Younger paleontologists are working to overcome some historical legacies of their discipline and change how people learn about natural history.
Credit…Mariem Hbaieb
In 2019, Mohamad Bazzi, a doctoral student at Uppsala University in Sweden, launched an expedition to Tunisia in search of fossils. He and his colleagues traveled to the phosphate mines around the city of Gafsa, where 56-million-year-old rocks record a time of rapidly warming oceans and mass extinctions, particularly of apex predators like sharks.
Mr. Bazzi made some distinctive choices for this paleontological expedition.
For starters, his team hired Tunisians to help dig, rather than bringing students from his university. Mr. Bazzi and his colleagues also chose to reach out to the residents of Gafsa wherever possible, holding impromptu lectures on the area’s fossil history to interested onlookers. This was a contrast with the secretiveness of many paleontologists in the field, who might worry about their sites being raided for the fossil black market.
The fossils the team collected from Gafsa are important for learning more about how animals adapted to the hothouse world of the Eocene, a period that may foretell what’s in store for the planet in coming years if carbon emissions don’t slow.
But while Mr. Bazzi’s team removed the fossils from Tunisia, they did so under an agreement with local institutions that Mr. Bazzi himself insisted on: After he finished his research, the remains would be returned.
Historically, these specimens are seldom returned, and locals may never see them again. But Mr. Bazzi and his colleagues are part of a movement among the next generation of paleontological researchers, one attempting to change scientific practices that descend directly from 19th century colonialism, which exploited native peoples and their natural histories.
Over the last few decades, multiple countries have demanded the return of looted art, antiquities, cultural treasures and human remains from museum collections in North America and Europe. Countries such as Mongolia and Chile have likewise demanded the return of collected fossils, from tyrannosaur bones to the preserved remains of giant ground sloths.
“There’s a consistent pattern with these specimens of high scientific or aesthetic value, where they’re taken out of the developing world and shipped abroad to be displayed and shown to a wider audience elsewhere,” Mr. Bazzi said. “There should be some balance so that local parties have a say in what happens to them.”
Many countries with less money to spend on funding their own scientists are home to important fossil deposits that could drive major advances of our understanding of the prehistoric world. If the field of paleontology is to move forward, these researchers say, it’s important to figure out how to study specimens in these places without extending colonial legacies.
That will take the development of a different approach to the field, more like the ones being tried by Mr. Bazzi and other scientists that rely less on extraction and more on collaboration with and the development of local institutions.
While many cultures throughout human history have long traditions around collecting or studying fossil remains, the discipline of scientific paleontology — as well as the formation of modern natural history museums — arose in the 18th century, when European powers were actively colonizing large swaths of the globe. According to Emma Dunne, an Irish paleontologist at University of Birmingham in England, European scientists were part of a colonial network that sucked natural wealth — including fossils — into imperial capitals.
In the 20th century, some countries pushed back. Brazil and Argentina provide government funding of paleontology. Those countries and others, such as Mongolia, established laws forbidding the export of fossils from within their borders. The two South American countries also mandate that foreign researchers work with local paleontologists for research on fossils found in the country.
“You still do have non-Argentinian researchers working with local ones, for example,” said Nussaibah Raja-Schoob, a Mauritian paleontologist based at Germany’s University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. “But you definitely see that there is a bigger local influence.”
Even in the aftermath of colonialism, however, fossils from across the globe still tend to end up in American and European museums. Some are collected through approved scientific expeditions. But because fossils are also traded privately, fossil-rich countries with fewer resources and legal protections often see interesting and potentially valuable finds put up for auction in Western markets.
Questions about where fossils belong and who is best suited to work on them have sparked sharp controversies in recent years. In some cases, researchers have raised concerns about the ethics of working on such privately collected fossils — particularly those which may have been exported illegally. At the same time, paleontologists in Western countries have bristled at the rules required by countries like Brazil.
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Credit…Jose Luis Carballido/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In one case in 2015, David Martill, a paleobiologist at the University of Portsmouth in England, dismissed questions about his team’s lack of collaboration with Brazilian researchers on a specimen found there. “I mean, do you want me also to have a Black person on the team for ethnicity reasons, and a cripple and a woman, and maybe a homosexual too just for a bit of all round balance?” he said in an interview at the time with Herton Escobar, a Brazilian science journalist.
Dr. Martill said in an interview in December that he chose his words poorly. But he said he remains opposed to laws that dictate where fossils go. In 2020, he was a co-author of a paper on another find exported from Brazil and described without a Brazilian co-author.
Source: nytimes.com
