Re: paleonet AGI Report

[Martin Farley <mbfarley@xxxxxxxxxx>]

It is certainly not clear from the AGI report (which has been on the web 
for at least 18 months) that the number of academic paleontology jobs in 
the U.S. has declined. Certainly Karl Flessa's study (published in Priscum) 
found no such trend for the period 1980 to 1995.  He did find that the 
proportion of paleontologists had declined because geoscience faculties had 
grown.  There is no question of course that the number of paleontology jobs 
in the U.S. petroleum industry has declined greatly over the last two decades.

Nick Claudy at AGI was responsible for the AGI report and I have 
corresponded with him about his article on geoscience faculty in Geotimes 
last spring (probably available on the geotimes section of the AGI 
website). Claudy believes that the total number of geoscience faculty has 
declined in recent years but has no direct measure. I have found myself 
that it is devilishly difficult to determine this (using multiple editions 
of the AGI Directory of Geoscience Departments) even for North Carolina, 
because faculty listings of specialization changes, department mergers or 
splits, and so on.  Claudy, by the way, is one of the few science human 
resources investigators who recognizes that there many fewer academic jobs 
than potential applicants.

While there is no question that paleontologists find it is difficult to get 
an academic job, I'm not sure that it is more difficult than for other 
geoscience specialties. We had a non-paleo job at UNCP that came available 
very late in the hiring cycle last year (April) and received more than 65 
applications.

I am glad to see Mike Styzen's comment that some apprenticeship is going on 
in the U.S. oil industry. It is certainly clear from my own experience that 
even a paleontologist with a Ph.D. needs it to be effective. In most of the 
industry, however, apprenticeship is extinct because biostratigraphers with 
time/incentive to do it are extinct. I published a graph of the number of 
paleontologists employed by oil companies in the U.S. in Geotimes in 
October 2000, and I think that the number has declined since then.

I appreciate Rich Lane's willingness to act as a devil's advocate. I think 
he is right that there is a lack of unity among practitioners in different 
subdisciplines and the whole field suffers as a result.  He is also correct 
that communication (within and beyond paleontology) is a problem. One 
example comes from my interest in terrestrial paleoecology: I looked at a 
couple of terrestrial ecology textbooks.  The percentage of pages (rounded 
to the nearest 5%) devoted to what we know about terrestrial ecology 
derived from the fossil record was zero.

I'm not sure, however, that the status of paleontology even with funding 
agencies is as bad as he implies.  Certainly there is significant 
paleontologic work being funded by NSF via ODP, paleontology is involved in 
the Chronos project funded by Rich's program, and NASA has been funding 
paleontology, especially in conjunction with its astrobiology 
initiatives.  These areas may well slight data collection, but this is a 
broader problem in organismal biology.

Truly yours,

Martin Farley

Geology, Old Main 213
Univ. of North Carolina at Pembroke
Pembroke, NC 28372
(910) 521-6478

mbfarley@sigmaxi.org