Rather than excitement, the discovery of the species set off a Latin American movement to stop colonial palaeontology.
In December 2020, a paper in the journal Cretaceous Research sent shock waves through the palaeontology community1. It described a dinosaur species that the authors named Ubirajara jubatus — 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 palaeontologist 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 palaeontological 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 Ubirajara 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 of Ubirajara was obtained legally,” says David Martill, a co-author and palaeontologist at the University of Portsmouth, UK.
The practice can also deprive nations of knowledge and heritage, say researchers. “Fossils are special to us,” says Allysson Pinheiro, director of the Plácido Cidade Nuvens Palaeontological Museum in Santana do Cariri, Brazil, near where U. jubatus was found. “We have literature, arts and crafts, and music based on them.”
Unlike previous incidents, however, the publication of Ubirajara 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the Twitter campaign #UbirajaraBelongstoBR, Brazilian researchers protested against the paper, which was eventually withdrawn, and called for the fossil’s return.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 Ubirajara 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 paleontologists and paleontology 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 palaeontology.
