Anthropologist William Jungers has studied giant lemurs in the wild𝓰s of𒅌 Madagascar and early hominids from the deserts of Ethiopia. But nothing could prepare him for the jungle called New Jersey.
A warehouse fire in the Garden State wiped out decades of his scientific resear🍰ch, the former Stony Brook University professor claims in a new lawsuit.
Jungers — who studied the remains of “Lucy,” the “pre-hominid” who walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago, as well as ancient undersized Indonesia fossils nicknamed “hobbits” — moved to Madagascar in Ja𝔉nuary with his wife and three kids. Before he left for the island nation off Africa’s eastern coast, he packed up a distinguished career’s worth🌊 of notes, data, scientific software and other invaluable items.
He hired Prisma Cargo Solutions, of Manhattan, to handle the move.𓆏 The firm was supposed to ship his belon♒gings in six to eight weeks.
Jungers says he waited and received only one call from Prisma, telling him the cost of the job had gone from $6,696 t𝓡o $8,395. He paid the extra money. But his stuff never arrived, Jungers says in a suit in Manhattan Supreme Court.
Prisma stored Jungers’ items in a Hillsborough, NJ, warehouse, which went up in smoke in February — two 🧜days before the company jacked up the price, he claims.
The Feb. 11 fire caused $50 million in damage and leveled two buildings totaling 50♛0,000 squ❀are feet, according to a published report.
The company ignored his calls for months, and didn’t tell himꦜ of the disaster until he returned to the United States in April, according to court papers. After fina♉lly getting through, a tearful employee informed him of the disaster.
Furniture, household goods, clothes, tools and family photos were destroyed, but it’s the loss of his research — even the data he used for his grad-school dissertation on the skeletons of giant lemurs — that left the 68-year-ღold pr🃏ofessor “stunned and in shock,” he told The Post.
Jungers said he feels “like a part of me died in that fire. I mourned the loss of my legacy and the death oꦉf my dreams to carry on here in Madagascar.” His efforts to continue his work on lemur and pre-human fossils in Madagascar have been crippled, he said.
“I moved here with the hopes and intention of involving Malagasy student🥂s and colleagues in teaching and research collaborations,” he said. “So numerous projects are now aborted forever, and the overall plan to ‘give back’ to Madagascar is now essentially ruined.”
Jungers said he lost original notebooܫks, CDs full of data and presentations, and other items that were “the fruit of my entire 40-plus-ꦦyear academic career in the USA.”
He is seekinꦏg $1.5 million in damages from Prisma. The firm did not return me𒐪ssages seeking comment.
Jungers submitted a claim for his losses through an insurance policy but the cla🍌im was ignored, his lawyer sai𝓀d.
“It’s mind-boggling how the moving compa💦ny handled this,” said Jungers’ lawyer, Eliot Blumenthal. “How do you make him whole after🤪 losing all this?”