While it is worth noting that few institutions in Mexico have the infrastructure to hold extensive collections, this is more a consequence of holotypes collected from Mexico being kept abroad without institutional collaborations that help develop collections in the country. In an interview with the Press Office of the National Council for Science and Technology (Conacyt), Luis Espinosa Arrubarrena, Director of the Museum of Geology of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), emphasized that the lack of collections and museums in the country contributes to a lack of encouragement for young people to pursue a career in Palaeontology (Gómez Mayén, 2015). This situation is discouraging when there are Global North researchers actively finding fossils in Mexico from as early as 1886 (Carreño et al., 1989).

In 1944, an American expedition to Las Delicias, Chihuahua, Mexico, yielded a large amount of lower to middle Permian fossils to build a complete stratigraphy of the region. Eleven holotypes of brachiopods were collected, described, and stored at the Peabody Museum of Natural History (Cloud, 1944). Many foraminifera and ammonites were collected to build the stratigraphy of the region (King, 1934, 1944; Miller, 1944). Las Delicias Formation is one of the most critical localities to study the Permian in Mexico. However, most of the Permian research was performed by further foreign-based research projects (Newell, 1957; Cunningham, 1975; Wardlaw et al., 1979; McKee et al., 1988). Until very recently, Mexican researchers started to study the brachiopods of the Las Delicias Formation, describing five new species (Heredia-Jimenez et al., 2019), bridging a hiatus of research of about 28 years. The project was funded by UNAM through their Programa de Apoyo a Proyectos de Investigación e Innovación Tecnológica (PAPIIT). However, the project could not fund a trip of the Mexican team to the YPM to analyze the historical material housed there, and the research was widely restricted to the photographic material published in 1944. During this time, the YPM did not consider the material a priority for it to be digitized or widely available for Mexican researchers. Furthermore, the revision performed by the Mexican team was published in Spanish in a local journal where it will face the challenges of not being used by non-Spanish speakers. This situation obviously decreases the inherent value of the project in the current publication system.

In 1966, an American expedition team from Midwestern University travelled to Cueva del Abra, in the Antiguo Morelos Municipality of Tamaulipas, Mexico (Dalquest and Roth, 1970). There is no mention in the paper of any collaboration needed to access the caves; in the acknowledgements, there is no collaboration with any local researchers despite the work from these researchers, who have visited the cave, being in the reference list. The Cueva del Abra contains Pleistocene sediments, and a new species of pocket-mouse was described therein, Perognathus huastecensis. According to the inventory provided in the paper, all the mammal material was deposited at Midwestern University. Additionally, rich herpetofauna was discovered in Cueva del Abra, including several fossil frogs (Holman, 1969; Holman, 2003). According to Holman (1969), bird remains were identified and sent to the University of Florida. No further research on this Pleistocene fauna has been performed by researchers based in Mexico.

These two examples show that parachute science has prevented Mexico from developing its paleontological research and has added an extra cost for Mexican researchers to build it. If new research projects are to be done in the localities where holotypes have been exported, the funding will need to cover travel costs to those institutions abroad (either in the US or in Europe), making undergraduate and postgraduate research more expensive than their counterparts in those countries. If this funding is not available, the value of the original Mexican research is decreased, making the development of paleontology more expensive. Of course, repatriation cannot be considered the only solution, and advocating for a nationalistic approach to science is in no one’s best interest. Nevertheless, several strategies can help bridge the gap, such as digitization of imported material or funds and grants devoted specifically to local researchers who need access to the material. These are only ideas, but we need to have these conversations to think about affordable and practical solutions. Mociño, for instance, considered that although the Linnaean system was important to understand the organization of the living world, recognized that the knowledge accrued by the Native Americans was important to classify and study the collected material. However, we are primed today to think only the knowledge produced in European-styled academia is the one worth looking at.

Indiana Jones is still used as the icon to represent the study of the sciences of the past, like anthropology, paleontology, or archaeology. Every now and then, National Geographic will pull up an Indiana Jones look-alike on the front page of a new discovery. In a way, The Man in the Panama Hat was not that off in his response when Jones told him, “that belongs in a museum!”… “So do you!”.