Fossils and Posterity

the Vital One said:

A) As we dig up fossils, will future generations have fossils left to dig up? Are we digging up all the easy to retrieve fossils, meaning that future generations will have a much more difficult time finding and extracting them (similar to the situation with oil)?

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the Vital One said:

B) Are we contaminating the fossils we are digging up? Will generations living centuries in the future, with presumably more advanced scientific methods and techniques, be stifled by our current work?

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Ophiolite said:

On the first point @essentialsaltes has nailed it. The proportion of fossils collected to this time are a miniscule quantity of the total potentially accessible within a few feet of the surface of the Earth and practically speaking a non-existent quantity in terms of the total volume of fossils present somewhere in the crust. Erosion will continue to expose new troves of fossils with, or without our help.

There is no doubt that application of modern techniques, before, during and after collection, permit more information of higher quality to be collected. That said, the care of even the Victorian collector in preserving samples, is such that valuable work can be and is carried out on the large quantity of material stored globally in museums and universities.

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