Industry Paleontology

[hrlane@xxxxxxxxx]

     I enjoyed Martin's discussion very much, and for the most part he has 
     hit the nail on the head.  I think it finally is playing out that the 
     rethinking of paleontology is not just going on within industry, but 
     also within other organizational entities, as for example now in 
     government.  I don't think that it is over with yet, but they 
     can't do too much more to us in industry.  Unfortunately, we are 
     allowing it to happen to us, rather than being in control of the 
     monster.  One of the problems with modern paleontology in industry and 
     government is summed up by Mike's exploration manager he quotes  as 
     saying "but surely biostratigraphy is all done now".  This is a comon 
     perception within the non-paleontologists in industry and it appears 
     in government also.  That exploraion manager did not develop those 
     ideas without some observations or experiences that mislead him to 
     them.  This is the paleontologists fault.  We have not appropriately 
     marketed ourselves because, most importantly, we have nothing new to 
     offer and secondly we don't fashion ourselves as marketers and 
     therefore there have been few proponents of paleontology to 
     effectively work on these exploration managers.  Since the inception 
     of paleobiology, little of real research value for industrial 
     application has come out of academia or the research institutes.   
     Instead, academic biostratigraphers are concentrating on the solving 
     the problems that should be left to the applied side of things (e.g., 
     bioostratigraphy of an area, consulting on the side, etc).  No real 
     break through approaches that are useful in a business environment 
     have come through, except for graphic correlation, which itself came 
     out of an industrial applied environment.  With industry paleo 
     staffing being what it is and with the heavy work loads, there is no 
     way these new break through approaches are going to come from that 
     side now.  So academia turns its back on biostratigraphy now!!!  Just 
     the right strategy to ensure that Paleo becomes another Greek 
     Classics!!!   
     
     Another point I would like to make about Martin's comments is about 
     the advent of sequence stratigraphy.  You need only check with a few 
     industry paleontologists in Houston to find out that they are out of a 
     job because of sequence stratigraphy.  Many paleontologists were laid 
     off because it was felt the same kind of answers, phrased in a 
     language understood by the geologists and geophysicists (not 
     pseudo-latin),  could be achieved through sequence stratigraphy.  Of 
     course, adequate sequence stratigraphy cannot be achieved without it 
     being backed up with good biostratigraphy.  But that point escapes 
     these non-paleontologists.  Sequence stratigraphy, as valuable as it 
     is, has laid off more paleontologists than it has caused to hire.  
     That is not the sequence stratigraphers fault, it is the 
     paleontologists because, he has not adequately differentiated the 
     results of both for the geologists/geophysicists and  because for the 
     most part paleontologists have not felt adequate enough to function 
     themselves as sequence stratigraphers, leaving this stage of data 
     synthesis to the geochemist, general geologist, and other sister 
     geoscientist specialists to reap the glory.  Paleontoogists should 
     have developed the concepts of sequence stratigraphy, because we are 
     the only ones armed with the tool of time calibration!!!  Instead we 
     wait around for decades discussing unresolvable taxonomic problems and 
     allow the geophysicists to developed this valuable tool.  Paleontology 
     is thought of as being a mature science in industry because of how 
     little we have changed our approaches over the last 4-5 decades.  
     
        We need new ideas and approaches from academia, not the same kind 
     of things that we are already developing and working on and competing 
     for within industry.  We don't need competition between  
     biostratigraphers, paleobiologists, or geobiologists (a new term to 
     replace paleobiology so as to fool NSF into thinking that we are doing 
     something new and original) to rule.  
     
     H. R. Lane