Tips to Corporate Letter Writers

Have you ever had to write a difficult letter to a member of the public? Of course you have! Well you may enjoy the skill of Harvey Rowe of the Smithsonian Institute in responding to Greg Boatright of Liberty Hill, Texas who digs things out of his backyard and sends them to the Smithsonian in the belief that they are archaeological finds.

Dear Mr Boatright,

Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labelled "93211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post…Hominid Skull".

We have given this specimen a careful and detailed examination and regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Williamson County two million years ago.

Rather, it appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety that one of our staff, who has small children, believes to be ‘Malibu Barbie’.

We are loathe to come to contradiction with your findings. However we do feel that there are a number of physical attributes of the specimen which might have tipped you off to its modern origin:

1. The material is moulded plastic. Ancient hominid remains are typically fossilised bone
2. The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately nine cubic centimetres, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified proto-hominids
3. The dentition pattern evident on the skull is more consistent with the common domesticated dog than it is with the ravenous man-eating Pliocene clams you speculate roamed the wetlands during that time

(This latter is certainly one of the most intriguing hypotheses you have submitted but the evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it. Clams don’t have teeth.)

It is with feelings tinged with melancholy that we must deny your request to have the specimen carbon-dated. This is partially due to the heavy load our lab must bear and partly due to the notorious inaccuracy in carbon-dating fossils of recent geologic record.

Sadly we must also deny your request to assign the specimen the scientific name Australopithecus spiff-arino. I for one fought tenaciously for it but was ultimately voted down because the species name you selected was hyphenated and didn’t really sound like it might be Latin.

However we gladly accept your generous donation of this specimen to the museum. You should know that our Director has reserved a special shelf in his own office for the display of the specimens you have previously sent and the entire staff speculates daily on what will happen next in your digs.

We eagerly anticipate your trip to the nation’s capital and several of us are pressing the Director to pay for it. We are particularly interested in hearing you expand on your theories surrounding the trans-positating fillifitation of ferrous ions in a structural matrix that makes the excellent juvenile Tyrannosaurus Rex femur you recently discovered take on the deceptive appearance of a rusty 9mm Sears Craftsman automotive crescent wrench.

Yours in Science

Harvey Rowe

Chief Curator – Antiquities