Professor Martin Becker of New Jersey’s William Paterson University shipped 19 boxes of fossils to a colleague in Florida — then they were dumped in a Tennessee landfill by UPS because the university failed to make their payments.
New Jersey’s William Paterson University is being sued by one of its professors for neglecting to pay their UPS bills — which eventually resulted in the professor’s rare collection of prehistoric fossils being dumped in a landfill.
The collection belonged to paleontologist and professor of environmental science Martin Becker, who spent decades of his career collecting Devonian Age marine invertebrate fossils from the High Mountain area of Wayne, New Jersey. Last June, Becker packaged 200 of these fossils — 80 percent of his collection — in 19 boxes to be shipped off to a colleague in Florida for a collaborative project.
He brought the boxes to William Paterson University’s mailroom, but according to the lawsuit, the university never paid their shipping bills, prompting UPS to deposit the fossils in a Tennessee dump. Now, the university is at the center of a lawsuit, with mailroom supervisor Raymond Boone also named as a defendant…