In the Published Fossil Record

To understand the present, we o en look to the past. Paleontologists have been accumulating a record of past life on Earth by digging up fossils and publishing research results. Paleontology, though, is something of a rich man’s game. Unlike, say, mining or agriculture, it doesn’t produce obvious monetary, industrial or dietary wealth. Rather, it adds to our wealth of knowledge. Per an article in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, this rich man’s game has resulted in an imbalance in the fossil record as recorded in publications.

Using the Paleobiology Database (which documents 1.5 million fossil records from 80,000 publications), Nussaibah Raja (Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany) and Emma Dunne (University of Birmingham, UK) examined sources of paleontological data and have found that as much as 97 percent of that data comes from fairly high-income countries. Said Raja to reporter Ewen Callaway, “I knew it was going to be high, but I didn’t think it was going to be this high.” With paleontological research agendas set by the few for the many, she and her colleagues warn that this imbalance would well “skew our understanding of the history of life.”