In recent years, the global palaeontological community has grown increasingly concerned about ethical issues surrounding Burmese or Myanmar amber, a fossil material type that preserves organisms from the mid-Cretaceous period (about 100 million years ago). It is found only in Myanmar, and tends to be exported out of the country in exploitation of a legal loophole that allows for the sale of amber as a gemstone (although not as a fossil-bearing material), with the result that the material is researched, published and remains outside its country of origin. In addition to concerns about helicopter research, there are also fears that the Myanmar military profit from amber sales while being involved in a bloody civil war against the country’s people. In an article published in September this year in Communications Biology, Emma Dunne and colleagues (including two scientists from Myanmar, Zin-Maung-Maung-Thein and Khin Zaw) conducted a bibliometric study of 872 amber publications published between 1990 and 2021, tracking trends in research on this controversial material. They found that Chinese and US-based authors dominate Myanmar amber research, and that only three papers included co-authors from Myanmar — the present paper makes the fourth since 1990. The amount of amber research published has increased markedly since 2014, which the authors correlate to the tapping out and subsequent decline of Chinese amber mines in the early 2010s, leading to an influx of amber pieces exported as gemstones from Myanmar into China. From the authors’ data, Myanmar amber research may have peaked in 2020 as both 2022 and 2021 look to have lower total volumes — they suggest that this could be the result of the increased scrutiny of amber research by the palaeontological community. The authors end by calling on countries, particularly China (as the current hub of Myanmar amber research), to live up to their ratification of the 1970 UNESCO convention on illegal trafficking of heritage by cracking down on the illegal import of fossils. We highlight this paper in our Year in Review collection as an exceptional manuscript that brings new insight into a thorny ethical issue, and which itself constitutes an example of ethical best practice by bringing Myanmar and international researchers together to research the problem.
Original reference: Commun. Biol. 5, 1023 (2022)
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