Re: growth of the discipline

[collom@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Christopher Collom)]

 I'm fairly confident about concluding from these data that the field (or
at least the mammal paleo sub-sub-field) has reached the limits of its
growth, and started doing so in the early 1980's. Has the ghost of Ronald
Reagan come back to haunt us? 


        Maybe.  Recall, though, that it was actually the Graham-Rudmann
Bill which did the most damage in the 80's; Ronnie was just a Republican
spectator.  Furthermore, as long as our research budgets keep getting
sliced (especially here in Canada recently), and journals are forced to
require or strongly urge page expenses from authors to cover their soaring
costs, we are not going to see a whole lotta new paleo publications in the
next couple decades.  Public interest in dinosaurs alone cannot carry the
field!

        Here's a statement I'll toss out there for y'all to argue over; if
each and every university in North America with a geosciences program were
to have a well-organized invertebrate and/or vertebrate paleontology course
taught at least once per year, the task of demonstrating the importance of
paleo to geology (in general) and our basic understanding of the Earth and
Life (i.e. are humans on the verge of going extinct?!) to those perhaps
unenlightened individuals / committees which decide our collective fates
with a stroke of a pen would be much eased.

        Anybody know what percentage of departments are lacking in this respect?




Topher
Calgary, Alberta
Canada