"A sunken ship full of dinosaur fossils" Topic

Here's an interesting museum lecture about the SS Mount Temple, perhaps most famous (or infamous) as the ship that sailed away from the sinking of the Titanic. It was sunk during World War I, and through some interesting detective work, the speaker makes the case it was carrying perhaps hundreds of fossils at the time, including some rare dinosaur specimens: youtu.be/8XTFNTDK7W8

Here's the Wikipedia page for those of you who don't want to sit through the hour-long lecture: link

The speaker believes we may be able to salvage the fossils from the bottom of the ocean, although the ship is more than two miles down. He notes that far more fragile things have been salvaged from other shipwrecks. I'd love to see an expedition to find it.

710 horses drown on that boat, ridiculous!!!

So, it's not OK to plunder the Titanic, but it's OK to plunder the Mount Temple. What's the difference?

Would the fossils be that valuable?

Rellik, maybe they were transporting burgers…..

@Rellik: Maybe the horses swam back to shore… from the middle of the Atlantic… hey, I'm trying to think of a happy ending here…

@John: I'd argue the difference was this is a ship that was deliberately sunk with little loss of life (humans, that is, not horses), and the fossils still have scientific value.

@morrigan: Dinosaur fossils sell for six-figures on the open market, but I have a hard time seeing them cover the expense in this case. This would need to be funded for purely research reasons. That's not entirely out of the question: Jeff Bezos recently funded an expedition that recovered Apollo rockets from roughly the same depth in the ocean: link

Drowning has got to be one of the worst ways to go!

Cool. (Not the drowning part)