A few years ago, around the centennial celebration of the opening of the Panama Canal, folks in the know realized it was now too small for modern shipping. The solution? EXPAND IT! This was great news for the economy of Panama and for paleontologists. As you can see in the map below, lots of plants grow in the tropics, and those plants make it very hard to dig into the bedrock and find fossils.
Guess what expanding the canal does? It exposes the rocks! You can see the effect in the map above, i.e. it's not green.