Comment on the letter of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) dated April 21, 2020 regarding “Fossils from conflict zones and reproducibility of fossil-based scientific data”: Myanmar amber
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Comment_on_the_letter_of_the_Society_of_Vertebrate_Paleontology.pdf
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999.05 KB
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Resource type
Journal article
Creator (person)
Haug, J T
Azar, D
Ross, Andrew
Blagoderov, Vladimir
Date published
August 1, 2020
Abstract
Recently, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) has sent around a letter, dated 21st April, 2020 to more than 300 palaeontological journals, signed by the President, Vice President and a former President of the society (Rayfield et al. 2020). The signatories of this letter request significant changes to the common practices in palaeontology. With our present, multi-authored comment, we aim to argue why these suggestions will not lead to improvement of both practice and ethics of palaeontological research but, conversely, hamper its further development. Although we disagree with most contents of the SVP letter, we appreciate this initiative to discuss scientific practices and the underlying ethics. Here, we consider different aspects of the suggestions by Rayfield et al. (2020) in which we see weaknesses and dangers. It is our intent to compile views from many different fields of palaeontology, as our discipline is (and should remain) pluralistic. This contribution deals with the aspects concerning Myanmar amber. Reference is made to Haug et al. (2020a) for another comment on aspects concerning amateur palaeontologists/citizen scientists/private collectors.
Journal title
PalZ
Volume
94
Publisher
Springer Nature
Place of publication
Switzerland
eISSN
1867-6812
Date accepted
June 22, 2020
Official URL
Rights statement
In Copyright