Comment on the letter of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) dated April 21, 2020 regarding “Fossils from conflict zones and reproducibility of fossil-based scientific data”: Myanmar amber

Motivation for this comment Recently, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) has sent around a letter, dated 21st April, 2020 to more than 300 palaeontological journals, signed by the President, Vice President and a former President of the society (Rayfield et al. 2020). The signatories of this letter request significant changes to the common practices in palaeontology. With our present, multi-authored comment, we aim to argue why these suggestions will not lead to improvement of both practice and ethics of palaeontological research but, conversely, hamper its further development. Although we disagree with most contents of the SVP letter, we appreciate this initiative to discuss scien…