Palaeontology and fossils in Hong Kong have generally received little attention in spite of a growing public interest in rock formations since the inauguration of the Hong Kong Geopark. The first local fossil discovery, a Lower Jurassic ammonite reported almost a century ago by Dr. C.M. Heanley, happened also to be the first fossil reported from South China, given that at that time most geologists and paleontologists were based in Peking, with their main sites of study in North China. Naturally, the investigation of fossils in Hong Kong has always been tied to that of the rocks that make up the region. The first such systematic study was carried out as part of the first geological survey of the territory in the 1920s, subsequent to the Heanley report, by a team of Canadian geologists, in an attempt to construct the stratigraphic history of Hong Kong, but it was the next pulse of study fifty years later in the 1970s, which eventually led to the publication of a two-volume palaeontological treatise. Given the fifty-year hiatus, it is of interest, using paleontology as a case study, to explore the value of the science in Hong Kong and the determinants that drove its development.