A professor filed a lawsuit against a New Jersey University that states that the negligence of the school led to the fossils of 380 million years ended up in a Nashville landfill last year.
Martin Becker, Professor of Environmental Sciences and paleontologist at William Paterson University, had planned to collaborate with a colleague in an integral monograph with his fossil collection, according to the civil lawsuit filed last week in a superior court in Passaic County.
Becker spent “hundreds and hundreds of hours” collecting the fossils of marine invertebrates of the age of Devonian of the high mountain area of Wayne, New Jersey, according to the demand.
Becker needed to send the invaluable collection to his colleague in Florida to advance with the project, the lawsuit said.
On June 18, 2024, Becker packed around 200 fossils in 19 separate boxes, which was about 80% of its collection. Each package weighed between 20 and 60 pounds, according to the suit. The fossils were taken to the WPU email room that same day and were given to the Supervisor of the Raymond Boone email room, who is also appointed accused in the case.
The packages were collected by United Parcel Service (UPS) on June 18. Boone told him that Boone would receive monitoring and safe information, but Becker states that he never received it, according to the demand.
In the following weeks, the lawsuit said that Becker’s colleague in Florida informed him that fossils had never arrived.
Becker said he received follow -up information on August 20 after making two phone calls to the mailbox to talk to Boone, according to the demand. The follow -up information indicated that the packages were in Parsippany, New Jersey, waiting for delivery.
Becker would communicate repeatedly with Boone during the course of a month with respect to the packages, said the demand, and Boone assured him three separate occasions that he was “working on the subject.”
On September 20, Boone advised Becker that fossil packages were possibly arrested in the UPS fraud department, according to the lawsuit. Becker contacted UPS directly on September 30 and was informed that his packages were intercepted because WPU could not pay pending invoices. As a result, the university account had been canceled.
“Our client learned that the packages were thrown to an unidentified landfill somewhere in Nashville, Tennessee or its surroundings,” says the demand.
The WPU account with UPS was canceled on April 24. The lawsuit states that Boone had been aware of this since July 8 and alleges that several other packages of other people had also been confiscated for the same reason.
Becker seeks not specified damage to the irreplaceable collection, plus medical expenses for the emotional anguish that the test has caused, according to the demand.
Boone declined to comment to NBC News. Becker and William Paterson University did not immediately respond to a request for comments from NBC News.
