When my mother died we found the credit card banks were completely unresponsive to any earnest attempts to notify them of the death, and so failed to make proper claims on the estate until it was way, way too late. They lost out.
For people who don’t understand 45 years of dilution, even if the guy had never sold a share he would not still own 1/3, probably more like less than 1%. Lots of new shares issued over the decades.
Sounds like this is not fossilization, but lucky preservation due to the ground conditions — peat bog, lack of oxygen or bacteria, etc. it’s rare though. Think of the 10’s of thousands of people who lived & died in the area over millennia — 99.9% did disappear.