ArticleRoyal Society open science2022
Digging deeper into colonial palaeontological practices in modern day Mexico and Brazil.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Local expertise anchors biodiversity documentation, but geopolitical power drives parachute discovery.npj biodiversity · 2026Review
- The hidden biodiversity knowledge split in biological collections.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- New frontiers in dinosaur exploration.Biology letters · 2025Review
- Historical and ongoing inequities shape research visibility in Latin American aquatic mammal paleontology.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Global natural history infrastructure requires international solidarity, support, and investment in local capacity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Museum 'dark data' show variable impacts on deep-time biogeographic and evolutionary history.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The Micropaleoecology Framework: Evaluating Biotic Responses to Global Change Through Paleoproxy, Microfossil, and Ecological Data Integration.Ecology and evolution · 2024Review
- A remarkable assemblage of petroglyphs and dinosaur footprints in Northeast Brazil.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Challenges and directions in analytical paleobiology.Paleobiology · 2023Article
- A forged 'chimera' including the second specimen of the protostegid sea turtleSwiss journal of palaeontology · 2023Article
- Article
- Ethics, law, and politics in palaeontological research: The case of Myanmar amber.Communications biology · 2022Review
- Article
- Digging deeper into colonial palaeontological practices in modern day Mexico and Brazil.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
13 authors.
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Abstract
Scientific practices stemming from colonialism, whereby middle- and low-income countries supply data for high-income countries and the contributions of local expertise are devalued, are still prevalent today in the field of palaeontology. In response to these unjust practices, countries such as Mexico and Brazil adopted protective laws and regulations during the twentieth century to preserve their palaeontological heritage. However, scientific colonialism is still reflected in many publications describing fossil specimens recovered from these countries. Here, we present examples of 'palaeontological colonialism' from publications on Jurassic-Cretaceous fossils from NE Mexico and NE Brazil spanning the last three decades. Common issues that we identified in these publications are the absence of both fieldwork and export permit declarations and the lack of local experts among authorships. In Mexico, access to many fossil specimens is restricted on account of these specimens being housed in private collections, whereas a high number of studies on Brazilian fossils are based on specimens illegally reposited in foreign collections, particularly in Germany and Japan. Finally, we outline and discuss the wider academic and social impacts of these research practices, and propose exhaustive recommendations to scientists, journals, museums, research institutions and government and funding agencies in order to overcome these practices.
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