via Science News, 21 June 2023: Archaeology-adjacent, but relevant. The practice of “parachute paleontology” or “scientific colonialism” involves researchers from high-income countries conducting fossil studies in middle- and low-income countries without collaboration with local experts, violating local laws and contributing to corruption, discouraging local scientists, and compromising research quality and ethics; Myanmar has experienced an extreme case of this phenomenon with the surge in publications on amber fossils coinciding with political shifts and concerns about funding military activities and human rights violations.
Around 2014, the worldwide number of papers on fossils preserved in Myanmar amber began to spike, paleobiologist Emma Dunne and colleagues reported in 2022. The timing coincides with some gemstone markets opening near the Chinese border with Myanmar. The trend also tracks with the military’s gradual takeover of gemstone mines beginning in 2010. The increase in paleontologists accessing Myanmar amber through those markets was probably very gradual at first, Raja says. It could have been as simple as “a paleontologist, by coincidence, sees something that’s really cool, and then [they] tell their paleontologist friends, and then more and more people start going to these markets to find more [amber specimens].” The team opted to look at three-year rolling averages of publications to account for the fact that peer review and publishing takes time.
Source: How ‘parachute science’ in paleontology plays out in 3 countries
