Scientific American - USA (2022-04)

84 Scientific American, April 2022

Source: “Colonial History and Global Economics Distort Our Understanding of Deep-Time Biodiversity,” by

Nussaïbah B. Raja et al., in

Nature Ecology & Evolution;

February 2022

1990 2000 2010 2019

0

30

60

90

1990 2000 2010 20191990 2000 2010 20191990 2000 2010 2019

Argentina Brazil France Myanmar

Number of Publications

(shown as three-year averages)

Domestic researcher alone

Domestic researcher with foreign collaborators

Foreign only

Location of the Researcher’s Affiliated Institution

Central Asia Eastern Africa

Central

Europe Americas Asia Africa Oceania

Eastern North America

North America

South

South

Central

Northern Southern Central

Western (Europe)

Eastern Western (Europe)

Eastern Other regions in Asia Northern Southern

Eastern Asia S.E. S. W. Eastern Middle Northern Africa SouthernWestern

NorthernSouthern

Published Research on Fossils Collected in Europe Published Research on Fossils Collected in the Americas

Published Research on Fossils Collected in Asia Published Research on Fossils Collected in Africa

Where
researchers
are from

Where fossil
data are
collected

Notable Collaboration Patterns Publications on Fossil Samples Collected in the Country by:

More than 100

publications per

year 2017–2019

48% of the

fossil data in

Africa are

collected by

researchers

from Europe.

Researchers

from Europe

collect the

majority of

fossil data in

Central Asia.

A higher

share of fossil

data in North

America are

collected by

researchers

from Europe

than those from

South America.

GRAPHIC SCIENCE

Text by Clara Moskowitz | Graphic by Youyou Zhou

Colonialism Shadows Fossil Science

Paleontologists from a small number of countries control much of the world’s fossil data

Rich countries overwhelmingly dominate paleontology research,

even when the fossils do not originate there, a new study shows.

Researchers analyzed 26,409 paleobiology papers from 1990 to

2020 and found that scientists in high- or upper-middle-income

countries contributed to 97  percent of fossil research. And those

from former colonial powers disproportionately controlled fossils

from their former colonies. For example, French researchers con-

ducted a quarter of all paleontology studies in Morocco, Tunisia

and Algeria; German scientists carried out 17  percent of research

on fossils from Tanzania; and 10  percent of studies on South Afri-

can and Egyptian fossils were conducted by British investigators.

“This was very eye-opening,” says Nussaïbah B. Raja-Schoob,

a paleontologist at the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlan-

gen–Nuremberg in Germany, who co-led the study, published in

Nature Ecology & Evolution. “With colonialism, certain countries

already had an advantage. After independence, the knowledge

wasn’t transferred back, so a lot of countries had to start from

scratch and with less money.”

Paleontology is a long-established discipline in Argentina and Brazil, the top two

research destinations in South America, where most domestic research is carried

out by local researchers. France, the chief research destination in Europe, has seen

an increase in local research with foreign collaborators. There has been an

increasing interest in fossils from Myanmar, especially organisms preserved

in amber, from foreign researchers since 2015.

Seventy-one percent of paleontology researchers who published papers

between 1990 and 2019 were from institutions in Europe or North America.

They dominated fossil data collection, both at home and abroad.