Grad Student Threatens to Sue Over Destruction of Rare Lizard Dung
Offered $750 in compensation and an apology after Leeds University mistakenly discarded an unmarked bag full of 75 pounds or so of rare lizard dung during an office cleanout, a graduate student isn’t buying.
Daniel Bennett plans to sue over the loss of the collection, which he had put together over seven years in a remote area of the Phillippines while studying the Butaan lizard, reports the Telegraph. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the United Kingdom university.
“To some people it might have been just a bag of lizard s—,” says Bennett, “but to me it represented seven years of painstaking work searching the rainforest with a team of reformed poachers to find the faeces of one of the world’s largest, rarest and most mysterious lizards,” reports the Press Association.
The university says it is resolving the matter internally and has learned from the experience about the need to establish procedures to prevent items from being mistakenly discarded.
Additional coverage:
BBC: “Uni sorry for lizard dung blunder “
