[Rockhounds] Court Rules Fossils are Minerals

[Paul]

On Friday, Nov. 3, 2018, Alan Silverstein wrote

 >Not necessarily.  As I suspected, legislation is rarely
 >retroactive, while court decisions usually are...
 >Think in terms of "righting a longstanding wrong"
 >through a court case.

It seems to me, that it would apply only to the
owners (or heirs of the owners) of the mineral
rights at the time that the fossils were collected.
If it was truly retroactive, a dinosaur collected
from a parcel in 1947 would belong to the
person, persons, and /or companies that owned
the mineral rights in 1947 and, not to entities
that subsequently acquired them the owners
at the time of collection.

(Of course, I am not a lawyer and, thus, likely wrong.)

An unknown person quoted in that post wrote:

 >> ...wouldn't it now be easier to secure "fossil rights"
 >>by purchase from said mineral owners...

...Text Deleted

and Al replied:

 >And, mineral rights are more often split upon inheritance
 >into much finer portions than are surface rights.  While
 >surface tracts can be divided among heirs, this is mostly
 >spacially unitary ("Bob gets the NW 1/4 and Sally gets
 >the NE 1/4"), while the underlying mineral rights (across
 >one or many subdivided surface parcels) are co-owned by
 >potentially dozens of people or other legal entities.

Such a situation would make it greatly cost ineffective for
anyone to sue for either the possession or their share of
the cost of a fossil unless it is a multi-million-dollar dinosaur
skeleton. Or would this open the way for class action suits
among multiple mineral rights owners?

Would Native American artifacts, under this ruling belong
to mineral rights?

Yours,

Paul H.