Colonial history and global economics distort our understanding of deep-time biodiversity Sampling biases in the fossil record distort estimates of past biodiversity. However, these biases not only reflect the geological and spatial aspects of the fossil record, but also the historical and current collation of fossil data. We demonstrate how the legacy of colonialism and socioeconomic factors, such as wealth, education and political stability, impact the global distribution of fossil data over the past 30 years. We find that a global power imbalance persists in palaeontology, with researchers in high- or upper-middle-income countries holding a monopoly over palaeontological knowledge production by contributing to 97% of fossil data. As a result, some countries or regions tend to be better sampled than others, ultimately leading to heterogeneous spatial sampling across the globe. This illustrates how efforts to mitigate sampling biases to obtain a truly representative view of past biodiversity are not disconnected from the aim of diversifying and decolonizing our discipline. The fossil record is our only direct evidence of how life on Earth has evolved over time, and reconstructions of deep-time biodiversity provide critical insights into future biodiversity change. The fossil record, upon which these reconstructions are based, is known to be incomplete and unevenly distributed across the globe1,2,3. Various taphonomic, geological and anthropogenic factors have been shown to introduce biases into estimates of deep-time biodiversity, extinction and evolution, and decades of research have documented and attempted to analytically mitigate their effects4,5,6,7. However, considerably less attention has been paid to how historical, social and economic factors influence the global distribution of fossil occurrences, and their consequent effects on our understanding of deep-time biodiversity.The natural sciences were developed around an extractive process facilitated by European colonialism in the nineteenth century. When zoological and botanical specimens were uncovered during colonial expeditions, they were shipped back to the respective imperial capitals, to be housed in museums, which were rapidly increasing in numbers to accommodate the influx of scientific material8. Many specimens collected during the colonial era are still being used for scientific purposes today by researchers based in these countries. Recently, plankton samples collected from the equatorial Pacific Ocean during the HMS Challenger expedition in the nineteenth century —that made use of the extensive colonial network and relationships developed by Great Britain during that time for the purpose of scientific exploration9—were used for a study led by British authors10. Fossil specimens were no exception, and their collection was dominated by imperial systems and exchanges11. For example, Charles Darwin aboard the HMS Beagle collected fossils in South America that were sent to London and studied by British palaeontologists12. These extractive research practices continue to this day within the natural sciences13, but especially in palaeontology where fossils and their collection underpin the discipline14.Compilations of modern biodiversity data show a clear association between knowledge production and wealthier, more politically stable countries, especially in northern America and western Europe15,16. This asymmetry in research makes a clear case for ‘scientific colonialism’, whereby the centre of knowledge of a certain country is located outside of that specific country17. Scientific colonialism is often equated with the term ‘parachute science’, where researchers, generally from higher-income countries, ‘drop in’ to other countries to conduct research and leave without any engagement with the local community, including local researchers18. However, parachute science represents only a small part of this issue. Scientific colonialism also refers to instances when the expertise of local researchers is devalued and laws within these countries are violated19. This disjunct hinders local scientists and domestic scientific development, by favouring foreign input and exacerbating power imbalances between those from foreign countries and those located ‘on the ground’. Furthermore, this can also lead to mistrust by local scientists towards foreign researchers, affecting future collaborations.Here we examine the evidence for scientific colonialism in palaeontology by exploring the causal relationship between the global distribution of fossil occurrence data and the legacy of colonialism, alongside associated socioeconomic factors. Using data from the Paleobiology Database (PBDB; www.paleobiodb.org), a publicly accessible database used widely by the palaeontological research community, we assessed which world countries are the main actors in driving global information asymmetry in palaeontology, and whether the accumulation of palaeontological knowledge is observed in certain regions or countries. Our goal is to advance discussions on the challenges of working with the fossil record, as it is critical to understand the imbalances in the production of palaeontological knowledge and its exchange between geographical regions.We observe that palaeontological research represented in the PBDB is predominantly carried out by researchers affiliated with institutions located in high- or upper-middle-income countries; 97% of fossil occurrence data based on the publications catalogued in the PBDB was contributed by authors based primarily in northern America and western Europe (Fig. 1). This pattern is unsurprising, given the history of the discipline and the position of the US and the European Union as leaders in research and development expenditure20. Researchers based in the US, who contribute over a third of the total fossil data (Fig. 1b), appear to conduct a similar amount of domestic (that is, within the US) and foreign research (that is, outside of the US by US-based authors). The next top three contributors are researchers in Germany, UK and France, who are each responsible for more than 10% of the total fossil data, and conduct a disproportionate amount of research abroad compared with domestic research; almost half of the former does not involve any local researchers, that is, co-authors with in-country affiliations (Fig. 1b). Among the countries contributing to less than 10% of the fossil data, Switzerland stands out as a country with a high proportion (86%) of palaeontological research conducted in foreign countries. The ratio of domestic to foreign research for countries such as the US, Canada and Australia, as well as countries of Central and Latin America, almost certainly masks ubiquitous within-country colonialist research practices, given the small proportion of researchers from indigenous and other marginalized groups in academic spaces21,22,23,24,25. Similarly, for countries that are overseas territories of former colonialist powers, such as Denmark in the case of Greenland or France in the case of French Polynesia, the local indigenous population rarely, if ever, contributes to research based on localities in these regions (Supplementary Table 1 and Extended Data Fig. 1). As such, fieldwork carried out by non-indigenous researchers on colonized or occupied territories (many of which are controlled by the state or federal government) could also be considered a case of scientific colonialism26. This, however, cannot be quantified within the scope of this study, but should be considered along with the recommendations made at the end of this Article.Fig. 1: Sampling sites of the fossil data analysed in this study and contributions by the top 15 countries to this data.a, The number of fossil localities sampled in each country displayed on a tile grid map to avoid distorting the representation of the data that is typical of standard map projections. Two-letter country codes are shown for countries with greater than 10,000 fossil localities. b, Percentage contribution of the top 15 countries to the total fossil data analysed in this study. The colour of each bar represents whether the authors of each country conducted their research domestically (that is, in the same country), in a foreign country, or in a foreign country without collaboration with local palaeontologists. Two-letter country codes: AR, Argentina; AT, Austria; AU, Australia; BR, Brazil; CA, Canada; CN, China; CZ, Czech Republic; DE, Germany; EG, Egypt; ES, Spain; FR, France; GL, Greenland; HU, Hungary; IN, India; JP, Japan; KZ, Kazakhstan; MA, Morocco; MX, Mexico; NZ, New Zealand; PA, Panama; PK, Pakistan; PL, Poland; RU, Russia; SE, Sweden; TR, Turkey; UK, United Kingdom; US, United States; ZA, South Africa.Among the top global data contributors, several countries conduct domestic research with low levels of contribution from foreign co-authors: China (75% of research is domestic), Argentina (66% domestic) and Japan (50% domestic) (Fig. 1b). In a skewed landscape where there is European and North American monopoly, these countries may initially appear as unexpected outliers, but not when their palaeontological research environment is further examined. These countries, along with India, Brazil and Mexico, are examples of ‘regional hubs of palaeontological knowledge’ (Fig. 2). In these ‘regional hubs’, most domestic research is carried out by local researchers (Extended Data Fig. 2) and the contribution of local researchers to these countries’ research output has been increasing over the past 30 years (Extended Data Fig. 3). Out of these countries, China is the most productive in terms of total research output (Fig. 1b and Extended Data Fig. 3). The establishment of palaeontology in China can be attributed to rapid geological surveying and mapping initiated in the 1950s, the excavation of several world-famous exceptionally preserved Lagerstätten and, recently, the enforcement of laws to retain Chinese fossils within the country (Supplementary Table 2). Similarly, palaeontology is a long-established discipline in Argentina, Brazil and Japan (Supplementary Table 2)—these countries have national palaeontological societies, universities offering palaeontology either as a standalone subject or as part of a wider programme, and national repositories for storing and curating these specimens on top of several funding opportunities for palaeontological research (Supplementary Table 2). These elements have a tremendous effect in shaping the culture and priorities in any discipline, palaeontology included, by acting as a catalyst for its advancement27. In the case of India, however, national funding agencies are less likely to provide funding for any work that involves fieldwork or research visits abroad (Supplementary Table 2), which is in contrast to many other countries where such rules do not exist. This represents a barrier to palaeontological research, especially when many Indian specimens are housed in foreign repositories but are inaccessible to Indian researchers because of travel restrictions. More recently, Brazil has been experiencing the same problems, due to the ongoing national political crisis and successive reductions in the country’s global scientific investment.Fig. 2: Relationship networks among countries, coloured by region, showing the ‘research destinations’ of researchers in palaeontology.The chords represent connections between the country of authors’ institutional affiliations and the country the fossil material was collected from. The size of each country’s circle represents the number of publications on foreign fossil material, also represented by the number of outgoing chords. The countries labelled in bold represent countries with more than 30 outgoing chords, that is, the most popular ‘research destinations’.World countries that experience a high incidence of parachute science and are exploited for their palaeontological data are primarily located in the Global South (Fig. 3a). We developed the ‘parachute index’ to quantify the extent to which countries are impacted by parachute science, on the basis of the log ratio of publications including local researchers versus publications not including any local researchers (Fig. 3). Many African countries are targets of parachute science (Fig. 3 and Extended Data Fig. 4), but only a handful of African countries have the infrastructures discussed above in place for palaeontological research (Supplementary Table 2). Most of the expertise around African fossils resides outside of the continent, with a clear link through colonial history to western European countries (Extended Data Figs. 3 and 5). For example, one quarter of all research conducted in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria was conducted by French researchers, 17% of research on fossils from Tanzania was conducted by German researchers, and 10% of research on South African and Egyptian fossils was conducted by British researchers. However, researchers from western Europe do not restrict themselves to conducting research in their respective former colonies (Extended Data Fig. 5). Rather, their scientific focus, along with tha
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01608-8
Colonial history and global economics distort our understanding of deep-time biodiversity
