paleontology departments lack of funding

[dyno77]

main question is why do most paleontology departments get short changed in funding?
Even some top dinosaur experts have mentioned this on interviews and have said if it wasn't for sponsors they wouldn't be able to go out and dig for dinosaurs....
Interestingly some of the experts state when the first jurassic park came around and even the 2 and 3rd ,the departments got some type of boost for a while...
On very rare occasions some dinosaur museums get donations from mostly a billionaire.but this is very rare ....but it does occur....i really though it would have gotten better by now but apparently from what iv read it hasn't...
so any backstage former or current employees know why this still is the case, since i dont get why other areas of the museum get funded so well esp in the main museums...in fact other areas sometimes get a new building twice the size of previous while the dinosaur department stays the same..in some rare cases iv read about...
Has it to do with popularity of the department, or whos in charge, or has to do with sponsors and tv deals? or is it something else?
Im not trying to take away that some dinosaur exhibits have been updated with huge display areas and new displays and mounts never seen before..but these are only a select few museums...usually with good funding or by some sponsor...but most of the paleontology museums dinosaur displays over the world dont get this...even after major finds....

[Newt]

Grousing about lack of funding is a favorite pastime of all researchers, so I wouldn't take this too seriously without some hard data. Dinosaurs are pretty well featured in most natural history museums that I have been to. Certainly researchers and enthusiasts of many other disciplines would love to get the kind of attention for their specialty that dinos have.


Remember too that most dinosaur researchers do not work for museums, they work for universities, and universities have even more demands on their limited pool of resources than museums. In my time in academia, I learned that most university researchers must find their own funding through grants and donations; the university pays them a salary and provides some facilities and tools, but the balance of research money must come from elsewhere. Again, nothing unique to paleontology, all researchers must do this.

[ceratopsian]

In my country finding funding for all areas of museum research has become a lot tougher. Many curators are on short term contracts that must be renewed annually. Jobs have been cut back over the last few years. It is not only palaeontology that fights for money. The current amount of government debt suggests strongly that this isn't going to change. Taking money from corporate and private individuals can be problematic in many different ways, even if an institution can attract it. Think of sponsorship by BP. Think of the Sacklers.

[Halichoeres]

I know this is an old thread, but just chiming in to say that there is often lots of money for biomedical research from governments (e.g. NIH) and from private donors, but basic science and natural history gets less. That said, dinosaur researchers get way, way more private research money than other natural history researchers. It turns out a lot of rich weirdoes are dinosaur enthusiasts.

[irimali]

I wish I was a rich weirdo.  I'd be funding so much paleobotanical research. That and paleozoic life in general.

[Halichoeres]

I wish I was a rich weirdo.  I'd be funding so much paleobotanical research. That and paleozoic life in general.

For the sake of the field of paleontology, I wish you all the wealth and eccentricity you can handle.

[Stegotyranno420]

I know this is an old thread, but just chiming in to say that there is often lots of money for biomedical research from governments (e.g. NIH) and from private donors, but basic science and natural history gets less. That said, dinosaur researchers get way, way more private research money than other natural history researchers. It turns out a lot of rich weirdoes are dinosaur enthusiasts.

I love how this is true even before Dinosaurs/prehistoric animals boomed in popularity. Fredrick the Great owned a skeleton of hydrarchon(basilosaurus). Many kings, upper classes, scholars, and even priests of olden days owned fossils, even if they weren't sure what they were.  The Romans known about ammonites and even called them that(or something similar) in their time, and Julius Caesar supposedly owned a mini museum of fossils he found during expeditions.