A lawsuit over some lizard shit
Actually, quote a valid suit. From the
UK Telegraph:
Student in legal threat over excrement blunder
A student who spent seven years collecting lizard excrement for a PhD thesis is suing his university after it was thrown away.
Daniel Bennett is taking legal action against Leeds University following the blunder which led to 5st 7lb of excrement being incinerated.
He had collected the samples from remote areas of the Philippines as part of an investigation into the rare Butaan lizard.
The animal - a close relative of the Komodo dragon - was assumed extinct for more than 100 years and little is known about it.
Mr Bennett spent five years investigating their diet, population size and behaviour by sifting through excrement found on the jungle floor.
He then won a scholarship at Leeds where he was paid to analyse more samples at the university's faculty of biological sciences.
But two years into his PhD he returned from fieldwork to find his collection had been "accidentally" thrown away by technicians clearing space in a laboratory.
A bit more:
"Returning to Leeds from fieldwork, I was surprised to find my desk space occupied by another student and to see that photographs of my daughter, my girlfriend and my favourite lizards had been removed from the wall.
"My personal effects had been carefully stowed in boxes, but there was no sign of my 35kg bag of lizard ****."
He claimed the department took a further 18 months to issue a formal apology - and offer �500 in compensation - which he turned down last year. The student, who had since completed his thesis, said he was now suing the university.
The poo was the result of five years in the field collecting. By analyzing it, he would have been able to determine a lot about what it ate. With it gone, that data is no longer available until more is collected. I think that he is very justified in that suit -- the people cleaning the lab should have been able to recognize scientific materials and that people would not simply keep fifty pounds of shit around for no reason.
Posted by DaveH at February 5, 2009 7:13 PM