SÃO PAULO — Inside a container docked at a northern French port lay items that rightfully belonged to the people of Brazil. Two and a half tons of fossils illegally extracted from the northeastern state of Ceará and wrapped in copies of the local Diário do Nordeste newspaper were about to be sold to private collectors and possibly end up in European museum collections without raising any suspicion.
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French authorities discovered the smuggled cargo in 2013. The 998 fossils of plants, fish, insects, turtles and dinosaurs should never have left Brazil. Yet they only returned to the country in December 2023, after an international legal process that dragged on for a decade.
Unnatural sciences
This unique heritage, valued at more than 1 million euros, was only repatriated because the government of Ceará spent 330,000 reais to insure the transport of the fossils back to Brazil.
“It’s like paying ransom for something that was stolen from us,” says Juan Cisneros, a paleontology professor at the Federal University of Piauí (UFPI). Born in El Salvador, he has lived most of his life in Brazil and is dedicated to researching and denouncing fossil trafficking and scientific colonialism.
“The natural sciences established themselves precisely during the colonial exploration period.”
Scientific colonialism occurs when the science of a country is predominantly conducted abroad, as if the nation itself lacked the capacity to conduct research and produce knowledge. In Latin America, this began during the colonization period, as colonizers would take animals, objects, and minerals with monetary, historical or scientific value back to the capitals of European empires.
Even paleontology, a branch of biology that studies the life of Earth’s distant past, cannot escape this.
“The natural sciences established themselves precisely during the colonial exploration period, thus inherently becoming colonialist,” Cisneros says. While reconstructing life on Earth millions of years ago is a challenge for paleontology, it becomes almost impossible when the evidence is scattered across the globe. Trying to piece together a puzzle with pieces spread across continents yields an incomplete picture.
A scattered puzzle
The Brazilian fossils recovered from France in 2023 are now housed at the Plácido Cidade Nuvens Museum of Paleontology in Santana do Cariri, southern Ceará. The city is part of the Araripe Basin, a UNESCO global geopark known as one of the world’s five richest paleontological sites with evidence from the Cretaceous period (between 145 and 65 million years ago). This is precisely where the fossils found in the container originated.
The region’s distinguishing feature is the degree of preservation of the discovered vestiges.
“When we talk about fossils, you might think only of bones, but here [in the Araripe Basin] it’s not just skeletons. We have dragonfly wings, fish hearts, pterosaur crests — details not found elsewhere,” says Allysson Pinheiro, director of the paleontology museum that received the 998 repatriated fossils.
The Araripe Basin is so rich in fossils that during the 1970s, these finds were sold at open markets like fruits or vegetables. In homes, they were decorative objects and even used as doorstops.
88% of Araripe Basin fossils described in scientific publications are housed in foreign museums.
This abundance attracted foreign scientists, who began visiting Santana do Cariri and paid meager amounts for the valuable finds of local workers. At the height of the exploitation, trucks loaded with fossils would leave the city and, without any records, be shipped to Europe and the United States.
“At that time, no one in the region understood that those fossils were so rare and worth so much money,” Pinheiro says.
Since 1942, Brazilian legislation has stipulated that fossils are property of the state and, therefore, cannot be commercialized or transported outside the country without specific authorization. Yet a 2022 study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science estimated that 88% of Araripe Basin fossils described in scientific publications are housed in foreign museums, clear evidence of scientific colonialism. More than half of these articles did not involve Brazilian researchers.
Cultural and economic importance
The legal process for the ownership of the fossils intercepted in France was based on the 1942 law. The same applied to the efforts to recover the dinosaur Ubirajara jubatus, dated to 100 million years ago and also illegally extracted from Ceará. Considered the oldest dinosaur in the Araripe Basin, the specimen was returned to Brazil by the German government in July 2023, which recognized the questionable circumstances surrounding the fossil’s arrival in Europe.
The repatriation, a result of years of negotiation, marked a turning point in the debate over the restitution of historical and cultural heritage, and stirred social media under the hashtag #UbirajaraBelongsToBR. The dinosaur, once in exile, now resides at the Plácido Cidade Nuvens Museum of Paleontology.
Returning fossils to their exact place of origin is no mere coincidence. Cisneros explains that fossils hold cultural value, attracting public attention, contributing to local culture and education, generating income and attracting tourism.
“When these fossils are not in Brazil, we lose all these benefits. We must fight for their preservation and ensure they are as close as possible to where they were found,” he maintains.
The significant number of visitors to the Santana do Cariri paleontology museum underscores this importance: The institution receives between 20,000 and 30,000 visitors annually, exceeding the town’s population of about 16,000, according to the 2022 Census.
“The museum is a major economic support for the city. Our region faces enormous socioeconomic challenges, has low Human Development Indexes, and needs engines for development. That’s why we steadfastly support the fossil repatriation discussion; it is critical for the area,” says Museum Director Pinheiro.
Unpacking heritage
One argument used by Europeans and North Americans to justify the appropriation of Latin American fossils is the claim that these objects precede human presence on Earth. This reasoning, upheld by scientists such as John Nudds and John Martin, argues that because fossils did not coexist with humans, countries do not have the right to claim ownership.
John Nudds of the University of Manchester published an article in 2001 in The Geological Curator, challenging his colleagues to ignore the United Kingdom Museums Association’s code of ethics, stating, “fossils have no relationship to the country in which they were preserved.”
“It is something we inherited. A country that inherits such a heritage has the mission to safeguard it.”
John Martin, in a 2018 article in the same journal, argued that “when those fossilized organisms lived, geopolitical boundaries did not exist, so fossils have no national identity.”
Cisneros vehemently opposes these ideas: “The fact that something is older than us does not mean it isn’t our duty to care for it. It is something we inherited. A country that inherits such a heritage has the mission to safeguard it.”
Fortunately, the debate is evolving. “While it wasn’t always this way, today we can openly discuss with institutions, countries, and the international scientific community and show that these fossils belong here, are a right of the Brazilian people, and can change the reality of the population. They should never have left, but those that did deserve to return,” Pinheiro concludes.
