In December 2020, a paper in the journal Cretaceous Research sent shock waves through the community. It described a dinosaur species that the authors named — the first dinosaur found in the Southern Hemisphere to display what were probably precursors to modern feathers. The 110-million-year-old fossil had been collected in Brazil decades earlier — but no Brazilian had ever heard of it. The authors of the paper were from Germany, Mexico and the United Kingdom.
It was the latest instance of what some researchers now call colonialism, in which scientists from wealthy nations obtain specimens from low- and middle-income countries without involving local researchers, and then store the fossils abroad. The practice can sometimes be illegal. For instance, according to Brazilian law, the country’s fossils belong to the state, although the authors of the paper say that they had a permit signed by a Brazilian mining official allowing them to export the specimen. “As far as the authors are aware, the specimen was obtained legally,” says David, a co-author and at the University of Portsmouth, UK.
The practice can also deprive nations of knowledge and heritage, say researchers. “Fossils are special to us,” says Pinheiro, director of the Plácido Museum in Santana do, Brazil, near where U. was found. “We have literature, arts and crafts, and music based on them.”
Unlike previous incidents, however, the publication of sparked a revolution.
Through the Twitter campaign #UbirajaraBelongstoBR, Brazilian researchers protested against the paper, which was eventually withdrawn, and called for the fossil’s return. The specimen is currently located at the State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe in Germany, but officials say that the museum is involved in negotiations to send it back to Brazil.
Even more significantly, the incident prompted associations across Latin America to join forces to end the practice. The growing movement is even attracting interest from scientists in Mongolia and other countries beyond Latin America that are affected by colonial.
Juliana, president of the Argentinian Paleontological Association in Buenos Aires, describes the episode as the “last drop”. “In previous situations, we didn’t express ourselves,” she says.
One of the fruits of the movement has been the publication of journal articles surveying the extent of colonialism in Latin America and elsewhere. In March, for instance, a report2 reviewed decades of papers describing fossils from Mexico and Brazil. The authors, 200 studies published between 1990 and 2021, and found that more than half did not include local researchers. Of the Brazilian fossils described, 88% were stored outside Brazil.
Some in the community, however, have disputed the paper’s findings. Says that the paper “is a pseudo-scientific study with a highly cherry-picked data set”, and adds that it ignores practices by US and focuses on European researchers. He was a co-author on papers highlighted by the survey.
In the past, when issues of scientific colonialism were brought up with colleagues in wealthy countries, incidents were chalked up to anecdotal occurrences, he says. “Now that this is published in a scientific journal, there’s no way to ignore it anymore.”
Jeff Liston, president of the European Association of Vertebrate, who is based in Edinburgh, UK, and has studied the illegal fossil trade in China, says that the scientific community has been aware of issues related to colonial for some time — but the debate in the past few years has brought the discussion to a broader audience.
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