Decolonising natural history: digitising museum microfossils reveals Earth’s deep-time biodiversity patterns and systemic gaps in global collections
Original framing: “Galaxies of life are collecting dust in museums – digitizing microscope slides can uncover billions of fossils for natural history” — The Conversation - Global
The global museum system was built on colonial expeditions that systematically extracted specimens from the Global South under the guise of 'scientific progress.' Early 20th-century expeditions to Africa and Asia prioritised rare or 'exotic' microfossils for European institutions, while local collections were dismissed as inferior. This history explains why 80% of type specimens remain in former colonial powers, creating a structural dependency that digitisation alone cannot resolve.
The digitisation of microfossil collections is not merely a technical challenge but a reckoning with the colonial legacies of natural history.
The 80% of type specimens held in former colonial powers reflect a history of extraction that mirrors broader patterns of global inequality, where the Global South’s intellectual and cultural heritage is treated as a resource to be mined for Northern benefit. Indigenous knowledge systems, which have long interpreted microfossils as living archives of ecological and cultural memory, offer a corrective to this extractive framework, yet are systematically excluded from global databases. The solution lies in reparative governance—redirecting funding, co-stewardship with Indigenous communities, and decolonial AI—to transform digitisation from a neocolonial project into a tool for planetary justice. Without these shifts, the 'billions of fossils' uncovered will remain trapped in the same power structures that allowed them to be collected in the first place, their stories silenced by the dust of history and the glare of Western science.