I’ve been asking myself that question for a while now. When I started looking into the legal issues surrounding Burmese amber back in 2021, I soon found out that under international law, fossils (and other natural history specimens) are considered cultural property.
Put differently, there is not much of a legal difference between a Roman bust, a Benin bronze, a Picasso, and a T. rex skull. And yet, the issue of restitution has become so prevalent regarding ‘traditional’ cultural objects while leaving natural history collections virtually untouched.
As I was arguing against this natural/cultural divide, I began to realise that I had never stopped to ask why it was there in the first place. An invitation to speak at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in June 2025 gave me a first excuse to look into that, and I spent the following months trying to figure out why natural history museums and cultural museums feel like such different, disconnected worlds—even though the law treats all of their objects as cultural property.
