The DinoBase Public Forum

3. What do you consider to be the biggest problem with palaeontology?

I get the feeling that many members of the public don't take palaeontology seriously. They see it as something silly and of no value to anyone other than palaeontologists and small children, and so they consider anything we do to be less than any other science. There's also the problem with this of "How can you tell that from a pile of old bones", the information is getting out about stuff like Velociraptor having feathers, but people aren't seeing HOW we know this. Sadly the argument "How do you know, were you there?!" tends to come up a lot.
I also see Creationism as a problem, but not academically. It's the public sector where the problem is - They have better PR. We're trying to inform, they're putting on a show, and sadly doing much better due to better funding. – SC

Probably the cult of the impact factor, which results in relentless pressure to publish frequently and publish in high-profile journals. It leads to an atmosphere that's a bit too frenetic, and one that discourages precisely the types of publications that are often most useful to researchers - monographs and review articles. Conciseness ends up winning out over comprehensiveness and clarity, and the literature ends up excessively fragmented and user-unfriendly as a result – CS

The problems that we are trying to answer are so big and so broad that I'm not sure if any of us are trained broadly enough. I know I certainly am not - I could really benefit from knowing more about embryology, life histories, community ecology, stratigraphy...it's not that I haven't taken courses and read papers in these areas, it's that I am fairly well informed in my research area but a dilettante or an ignoramus in most others. It's easy to joke about how great it would be to have two or three centuries to get caught up on all the reading and writing that we want to do, but what if it would really take that long to get a deep enough understanding of all the relevant subjects to solve the problems we need to solve? That's a hollow dream, though, because science is always changing and you can never stay on top of it all. But that's also a source of hope - the problems are huge, but the community is bigger and smarter and longer-lived than any of us. We are cells in this organism, science, and the big problems will be solved by that organism - even though only a few of the cells may get the credit! – MW

The lack of REAL cooperation between different fields of science (palaeontology, biology, geology) which are, especially in the case of palaeontology, hardly reliable without eachother's help and scientific acknowledgement. I would also prefer a stricter scientific censorship for some publications – EP

The general lack of understanding of science that the public has insufficient exposure to science that our school children receive. This transfers up to the ‘professional’ scale so that a subject like palaeontology is considered to be a ‘soft’ science and really only descriptive, even by out peers – A1

Except the dinosaurs and some related vertebrate groups, people in general appear to become more and more uninterested in paleontology (but probably this is true  globally for natural sciences), thus money for paleontological research is also fewer - AO

The biggest problem is showing decision-makers and funding agencies that palaeontology does matter, even though it has few or no practical applications, and that it is not only some kind of mouldy 19th century science for fossil collectors - EB

Paleontology has no direct benefit for economy and so few research funds – A3

Lack of funds. However, this problem might be linked for a part to the
5th question. - OM

Lack of funds is another perpetual issue.  Creationism is a non-issue; better public education on evolution (and the sciences that feed it, like biology, geology, and paleontology) are, however, huge issues -JH

In Germany one of the biggest problems seems to be the decreasing importance of palaeontology in general: So fewer students are studying the subject and those who completed their studies and graduated have serious problems to find employment. - HT

Funds and good training programs. Most of us are unable to provide the kind of well rounded training in paleo that is really needed for the next generation. A close third is the general low level of collaborations between colleagues – RR

Scientists are human - JO.

In many ways paleontologists have lost their grip on important issues like evolutionary dynamics, because the biologists have taken over. But genetics and developmental biology are not adequately tied into the actual fossil record and major trends as referred to in item 2. But maybe that will come - ML

Poor integration between earth systems studies and life sciences; with paleontology on the fringes of both disciplines, we tend to get overlooked in big plans (NSF organizational charts, for instance) within one of these spheres or the other. – TH

Lack of quantitative skills among many researchers -AM

For me the biggest problem is private collectors. More specifically the kind such as inhabit the Isle of Wight for example. These territorial beach combers, who are very adept at finding incredible specimens have enough passion to go out every day looking for these things and restoring them, but won't hand them to science, even after they are dead. Without the pieces being in a museum, they cannot be recognised by science and it's this selfishness that I cannot understand. - TF

Regulation of collecting and the criminalisation of fossil collecting - DM

Restrictive fossil collecting – LJ

Lack of understanding of how dynamic our growing understanding of the history of life is, and the fact that paleontology is crucial to neontology, with modern fauna representing only the tip of the iceberg, thereby inherently limiting the scope of any neontological inquiry – A2



My comments:
It is interesting that the continental Europeans (A3, EB, OM and AO) all think that the funding issue is tied to the public and / or government perception of palaeontology as a science with little ‘real’ value. I wonder if this is true in other areas, and just more keenly felt here than in the UK or US. Funding is of course a perpetual issue and one that all scientists would complain about, but still in my (limited) experience money is more accessible and more easily obtained in America than Europe. I suspect this is at least in part due to the contributions of philanthropists and donors which as far as I can tell, pretty much does not exist in Europe.

The cult of the impact factor that Corwin refers to is certainly a big issue and one that affects young researchers far more than those at the top, but one that influences everyone. The overall attempt to ‘manage’ academia and quantify research (see #72) is the ultimate cause of this, and while it is not exactly a threat per se, it does impact seriously on how work is carried out and directed and could become more pronounced in the future.

Finally, of course private fossil collecting, and the restrictions placed on scientists themselves are a real concern. Ultimately all of our working data comes from the fossil record and with many vertebrate groups in particular, each individual fossil is valuable. When we are prevented from collecting them, or others collect them and hide them in private collections the science is fundamentally weakened.



Participants:
Anonymous 1, UK – A1
Anonymous 2, USA – A2
Anonymous 3, Austria – A3
Dr Eric Buffetaut, Paris – EB
Simon Clabby, Isle of Wight - SC
Tom Fletcher, Bristol – TF
Dr Jerry Harris, Utah - JH
Thomas Holtz, Maryland - TH
Dr Liu Jun, Beijing – LJ
Martin Lockley, Denver - ML
Dr Alistair McGowan, Aberdeen - AM
Dr Olivier Maridet, (French) Beijing – OM
Prof. David Martill, Portsmouth - DM
Jingmai O’Conner, Beijing (USA) – JO
Dr Attila Osi, Budapest - AO
Edina Prondvai, (Hungarian) Karlsruhe – EP
Prof. Robert Reisz, (Romanian) Canada - RR
Dr Corwin Sullivan, (Canadian) Beijing – CS
Dr Helmut Tischlinger, Eichstaett - HT
Dr Mathew Wedel, California - MW