More than 1,300 people have signed a petition calling for the Natural History Museum (NHM) to reconsider a proposal to cut its micro-palaeontology research team. The NHM is looking to save £2.3m and will make 40 posts redundant this year.
But the decision by the NHM’s keeper of palaeontology, Norman MacLeod, to put forward two micropalaeontology research posts and two collections support posts, leaving just one curator in the department, has led to an outcry.
In a message to colleagues, MacLeod wrote: “Research programmes are important to the museum, but they are not regarded as part of its core business. In effect, the budget axe had to fall somewhere in the palaeontology department – and this is where it fell.
“I hope I will not be asked to make further cuts in the department. I fear I probably will be asked to do so, though the senior management of the NHM is doing all it can to avoid any further damage to the museum programme.”
Tom Dunkley Jones, a research fellow at Imperial College London, who orchestrated the petition, said it meant the palaeontology department was, in effect, left with no micropalaeontology research capacity.
Michal Kucera, president of the Micropalaeontological Society, said: “We are worried that the collections will not be best placed at the NHM if this plan goes forward, as the community requires interaction with someone who can understand research questions – and this would no longer be there. Within five years, the collections will be far less used.”
“The museum is taking out a whole area of research. I’m not sure what the logic behind that was, but we are losing an important area of expertise and collections management.”
Tom Dunkley Jones, research fellow, Imperial College London
“We are convinced that this decision is not in the museum’s interest. Micropalaeontology is used in oil exploration. The museum is closing the only unit of industrial relevance. The critical thing is that there is no other such place in Britain.”
Michal Kucera, president, the Micropalaeontological Society
“By cutting this team in its entirety, the NHM is not only inflicting immediate damage on our international reputation in the science of global change, but it is also undermining the UK’s scientific knowledge-base well into the future.”
Paul Pearson, School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Cardiff University
