Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be paleontologists...
Just like Willie Nelson's cowboy song, the life of a paleontologist is a rough one, and the pursuit of earning an income is being pitched out by smaller science budgets. Roy Plotnick, published a study of paleontology employment in the latest issue of Palaeontologia Electronica. What is most striking about his study is the high numbers of students and retired paleontologists in the United States and the small number of fully employed paleontologists. This study is a follow up study to the Flessa and Smith's (1997) study, which noticed a remarkable trend among major Universities and Colleges to staff only a single paleontologist, required to teach everything from the micro-fossils of the oceans, past climate change, the diversification of fossil plants, and the biology of dinosaurs in an ever more specializing scientific world. The prestige of these Universities and Colleges has fallen, but this lost of revenue is absorbed by the expanding "patentable" sciences, such as molecular biology, nanotechnology, engineering, and chemistry where industries maybe spawned in the local community. Plotnick's (2008) study reveals that there are only 56 full professors specialized in vertebrate paleontology teaching in the United States today. While this number is based on memberships to scientific societies, it does point to a failing view in society about the importance of paleontology to address scientific questions.
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