By looking through this window into the past, we can apply these lessons to today. When DePalmas paper was published just over 3 months later, During says she soon noticed irregularities in the figures, and she was concerned the authors had not published their raw data. Victoria Wicks: DePalma's name is listed first on the research article published in April last year, and he has been the primary spokesman on the story . The mud and sand are dotted with glassy spherulesmany caught in the gills of the fishisotopically dated to 65.8 million years ago. American, said in a 2019 tweet that the findings from the site "have met with a good deal of skepticism from the paleontology community." . 2021 (106) December (5) November (8) October (8 . Boca paleontologist Robert de Palma uncovers evidence of the day the dinosaurs diedand how it connects to homo sapiens. FAU's Robert DePalma, senior author and an adjunct professor in the Department of Geosciences, Charles E. Schmidt College of Science, and a doctoral student at the . [citation needed], At the time of the Chicxulub impact, the present-day North American continent was still forming. Scarred Duckbill Dinosaur Escaped T. Rex Attack - National Geographic Robert DePalmashown here giving a talk at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Aprilpublished a paper in December 2021 showing the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs struck Earth in the spring. Despite more than 200 years of study, paleontologists have named only several hundred species. To verify the study's claims, paleontologists say that DePalma must broaden access to the site and its material. Robert James DePalma Obituary - Visitation & Funeral Information Searching in the hills of North Dakota, palaeontologist Robert DePalma makes an incredible . In the early 1980s, the discovery of a clay layer rich in iridium, an element found in meteorites, at the very end of the rock record of the Cretaceous at sites around the world led researchers to link an asteroid to the End Cretaceous mass extinction. When I saw [microtektites in their own impact craters], I knew this wasnt just any flood deposit. Forum News Service, provided Manning points out that all fossils described in the PNAS paper have been deposited in recognized collections and are available for other researchers to study. [1]:figure S29 pg.53 In 2022, a partial mummified Thescelosaurus was unearthed here with its skin still intact.[7]. Robert DePalma. With Gizmodos Molly Taft | Techmodo. The Tanis site was first identified in 2008 and has been the focus of fieldwork by paleontologist Robert DePalma since . According to Science, DePalma was incorrect in 2015 when he believed he discovered a bone from a new type of dinosaur. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. In December 2021, DePalma and his colleagues published an important paper . While some lived near a river, lake, lagoon, or another place where sediment was found, many thrived in other habitats. DePalma, Robert | Department of Geology Paleontologist accused of faking data in dino-killing asteroid paper. View Obituary & Service Information [23], As of April 2019, several other papers were stated to be in preparation, with further papers anticipated by DePalma and co-authors, and some by visiting researchers.[24]. The first documents a turtle fossil found at Tanis, killed by impalement by a tree branch, and found in the upper of two units of surge deposit, bracketed by ejecta. What we do know is that during the Jurassic period, great global upheaval occurred with increases in temperature, surging sea levels, and less humidity. He is survived by his loving wife,. Still, when During submitted her manuscript to Nature on 22 June 2021, she listed DePalma as the studys second author. Subscribe to News from Science for full access to breaking news and analysis on research and science policy. [5] The original discoverers of the site (Rob Sula and Steve Nicklas), who worked the site for several years, recognized its scientific importance and offered it to DePalma as he had some previous experience with working on fish sites. Get more great content like this delivered right to you! Appropriate editorial action will be taken once this matter is resolved.. Eighteen months before publication of the peer-reviewed PNAS paper in 2019[1] DePalma and his colleagues presented two conference papers on fossil finds at Tanis on 23 October 2017 at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. He had already named the genus Dakotaraptor when others identified it as belonging to a prehistoric turtle. But no one has found direct evidence of its lethal effects. In the caravan are microscopes . The seiche waves exposed and covered the site twice, as millions of tiny microtektite droplets and debris from the impact were arriving on ballistic trajectories from their source in what is now the Yucatn Peninsula. Melanie During suspects Robert DePalma wanted to claim credit for identifying the dinosaur-killing asteroids season of impact and fabricated data in order to be able to publish a paper before she did. At his suggestion, she wrote a formal letter to Scientific Reports. Robert DEPALMA | Postgraduate Researcher | The University of Manchester The deposit may also provide some of the strongest evidence yet that nonbird dinosaurs were still thriving on impact day. In my view, it was an intentional omission which leads me to question the credibility of data. Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, says, There is a simple way for the DePalma team to address these concerns, and that is to publish the raw data output from their stable isotope analyses.. Other papers describing the site and its fossils are in progress. New Evidence Shows Experts Have Dinosaurs' Extinction All Wrong The skull of the scarred Edmontosaurus also showed signs of trauma, and from the size and shape of the marks on the bone, Rothschild and fellow co-author Robert DePalma, a paleontologist at the . . Ahlberg shared her concerns. (Courtesy of Robert DePalma) You and your team have made some extraordinary finds, including an exquisitely preserved leg of a dinosaur that you believed died on the very day of the asteroid impact. He did send Science a document containing what he says are McKinneys data. "It saddens me that folks are so quick to knock a study," he says. Numerous famous fossils of plants and animals, including many types of dinosaur fossils, have been discovered there. The 112-mile Chicxulub crater, located on the Yucatn Peninsula, contains the same mineral iridium as the KT layer, and it's often cited as further proof that a giant asteroid was responsible for killing dinosaurs (perBoredom Therapy). DePalma may also flout some norms of paleontology, according to The New Yorker, by retaining rights to control his specimens even after they have been incorporated into university and museum collections. I dont believe that Curtis himself went to another lab, he was ill for many years, Sacasa says. Paleontologist Robert DePalma, featured in PBS's "Dinosaur Apocalypse," discusses an astonishing trove of fossils. Proposed by Luis and Walter Alvarez, it is now widely accepted that the extinction was caused by a huge asteroid or bolide that impacted Earth in the shallow seas of the Gulf of Mexico, leaving behind the Chicxulub crater. Mr. Frithiof was able to broker an agreement between Paleo Prospectors and DePalma. "After a while, we decided it wasn't a good route to go down," he says. A fossil, after all, is only created under precise circumstances, with the dinosaur dying in a place that could preserve its remains in rock. He later wrote a piece for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In December 2021, a team of paleontologists published data suggesting that the asteroid impact that ended the reign of dinosaurs could be pinned down to a season springtime, 66 million years agothanks to an analysis of fossilized fish remains at a famous site in North . . Tanis (fossil site) - Wikipedia Bob was born in Newark, NJ on December 26, 1948 to the late James and Rose DePalma. Drawing on research from paleontologist Robert DePalma, we follow DePalma's dig over the course of three years at a new site in North Dakota, unearthing remarkably well-preserved fossilised . though Robert DePalma's love of the dead and buried was anything but . The Chicxulub impact is believed to have triggered earthquakes estimated at magnitude 10 11.5,[1]:p.8 releasing up to 4000 times the energy of the Tohoku quake.Note 1 Co-author Mark Richards, a professor of earth sciences focusing on dynamic earth crust processes[16] suggests that the resulting seiche waves would have been approximately 10100m (33328ft) high in the Western Interior Seaway near Tanis[1]:p.8 and credibly, could have created the 10 11 m (33 36 feet) high water movements evidenced inland at the site; the time taken by the seismic waves to reach the region and cause earthquakes almost exactly matched the flight time of the microtektites found at the site. Paleontologist Accused of Making Up Data on Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid This dinosaur, a giant reptilian, lived during the Early Cretaceous period in oceans. The death scene from within an hour of the impact has been excavated at an unprecedented . He declined to share details because the investigation is ongoing. (Formula and details)The 2011 Thoku earthquake and tsunami was estimated at magnitude 9.1, so the energy released by the Chicxulub earthquakes, estimated at up to magnitude 11.5, may have been up to 101.5 x (11.59.1) = 3981 times larger. Three papers were published in 2021. These include many rare and unique finds, which allow unprecedented examination of the direct effects of the impact on plants and animals alive at the time of the large impact some 3,000km (1,900mi) distant. All of these factors seemed strange and confused the paleontologists. Images: Top right, Robert DePalma and Peter Larson conduct field research in Tanis. Get more great content like this delivered right to you! The day 66 million years ago when the reign of the dinosaurs ended and the rise of . (DePalma and colleagues published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019 that described finding these spherules in different samples analyzed at another facility.). DePalma purported that these animals died during the asteroid's impact since the glass's chemical makeup indicates an extraordinary explosion something similar to the detonation of 10 billion bombs. Although fish fossils are normally deposited horizontally, at Tanis, fish carcasses and tree trunks are preserved haphazardly, some in near vertical orientations, suggesting they were caught up in a large volume of mud and sand that was dumped nearly instantaneously. 01/05/2021. With David Attenborough, Robert DePalma, Phillip Manning. We're seeing mass die-offs of animals and biomes that are being put through very stressful situations worldwide. If I were the editor, I would retract the paper unless [the raw data] were produced posthaste, he says. [8] The site continues to be explored. DePalma, now a Ph.D. student at the University of Manchester, vehemently denies any wrongdoing. Ultimately, both studies, which appeared in print within weeks of each other, were complementary and mutually reinforcing, he says. They seem to have left the raw data out of the manuscript deliberately, he says. Several more papers on Tanis are now in preparation, Manning says, and he expects they will describe the dinosaur fossils that are mentioned in The New Yorker article. Those files were almost certainly backed up, and the lab must have some kind of record keeping process that says what was done when and by whom., Barbi is similarly unimpressed. ", Since Tanis became an excavation site, several other fossils were found, including a pterosaur embryo. Seasonal calibration of the end-cretaceous Chicxulub impact event - Nature At the site, called Tanis, the researchers say they have discovered the chaotic debris left when tsunamilike waves surged up a river valley. The email, which came after Science started to inquire about the case, says their concerns remain under investigation. It also proves that geology and paleontology is still a science of discovery, even in the 21 st Century." Using radiometric dating, stratigraphy, fossil pollen, index fossils, and a capping layer of iridium-rich clay, the research team laboriously determined in a previous study led by DePalma in 2019 that the Tanis site dated from precisely . [5] Secrecy about Tanis was maintained until disclosed by DePalma and co-author Jan Smit in two short summary papers presented in October 2017,[2][3] which remained the only public information before widespread media coverage of the full prepublication paper on 29 March 2019. She also removed DePalma as an author from her own manuscript, then under review at Nature. By Nicole Karlis Senior Writer. During visited Tanis in 2017, when she was a masters student at the Free University of Amsterdam. New Evidence May Shed Light on Extinction Event That Killed the - MSN By Dave Kindy. Page numbers in this section refer to those papers. North Dakota site shows wreckage from same object that killed the Robert DePalma, a paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History and a graduate student at the University of Kansas, works at a fossil site in North Dakota. High impact paleontology - Medium It can be divided into two layers, a bottom layer about 0.5m thick ("unit 1"), and a top layer about 0.8m thick (unit 2), capped by a 1 2cm layer of impactite tonstein that is indistinguishable from other dual layered KPg impact ejection materials found in Hells Creek, and finally a layer around 6cm thick of plant remains. Several independent scientists consulted about the case by Science agreed the Scientific Reports paper contains suspicious irregularities, and most were surprised that the paperwhich they note contains typos, unresolved proofreaders notes, and several basic notation errorswas published in the first place. [1]:p.8 The site formed part of a bend in an ancient river on the westward shore of the seaway,[1]:p.8192[4]:pp.5,6,23 and was flooded with great force by these waves, which carried sea, land, freshwater animals and plants, and other debris several miles inland. Science asked other co-authors on the paper, including Manning, for comment, but none responded. On 2 December, according to an email forwarded to Science, the editor handling DePalmas paper at Scientific Reports formally responded to During and Ahlberg for the first time, During says. Paleontologist accused of faking data in dino-killing asteroid paper [18], DePalma began excavating systematically in 2012[1]:11 and quickly found the site to contain very unusual and promising features. They're perfectly preserved, Robert DePalma, paleontologist, via CNN. In the BBC documentary, Robert DePalma, a relative of film director Brian De Palma, can be seen sporting an Indiana Jones-style fedora and tan shirt. DePalma gave the name Tanis to both the site and the river. Dinosaurs' Last Spring: Groundbreaking Study Pinpoints Timing of By 2013, he was still studying the site, which he named "Tanis" after the ancient Egyptian city of the same name,[5] and had told only three close colleagues about it. . DePalma quickly began to suspect that he had stumbled upon a monumentally important and unique site not just "near" the K-Pg boundary, but a unique killing field that precisely captured the first minutes and hours after impact, when the K-Pg boundary was created, along with an unprecedented fossil record of creatures and plants that died on that day, as well as material directly from the impact itself, in circumstances that allowed exceptional preservation. Astonishment, skepticism greet fossils claimed to record - Science Tanis is on private land; DePalma holds the lease to the site and controls access to it. Robert DePalma. But two months before Durings paper would be published, a paper came out in Scientific Reports reaching essentially the same conclusion, based on an entirely separate data set, Science reported. 03/30/2022. "That some competitors have cast Robert in a negative light is unfortunate and unfair," Richards told Science. Miami Dade does not have an operational mass spectrometer, suggesting McKinney would have had to perform the isotope analyses underlying the paper at another facility. Fossilized snapshot of mass death found on North Dakota ranch He says the reviewers for the higher-profile journal made requests that were unreasonable for a paper that simply outlines the discovery and initial analysis of Tanis. Instead, the layers had never fully solidified, the fossils at the site were fragile, and everything appeared to have been laid down in a single large flood. Ive done quite a few excavations by now, and this was the most phenomenal site Ive ever worked on, During says. When asked for more information on the situation on January 3, a spokesperson for Scientific Reports said there were no updates. "Capturing the event in that much detail is pretty remarkable," concedes Blair Schoene, a geologist at Princeton University, but he says the site does not definitively prove that the impact event was the exclusive trigger of the mass extinction. After trying to discuss the matter with editors at Scientific Reports for nearly a year, During recently decided to make her suspicions public. Its author, Douglas Preston, who learned of the find from DePalma in 2013, writes that DePalma's team found dinosaur bones caught up in the 1.3-meter-thick deposit, some so high in the sequence that DePalma suspects the carcasses were floating in the roiling water. "I hope this is all legit I'm just not 100% convinced yet," said Thomas Tobin, a geologist at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Her mentor there, paleontologist Jan Smit, introduced her to DePalma, at the time a graduate student at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. Did Richard Sackler Go to Jail? Where is He Now? - The Cinemaholic In 2004, DePalma was studying a small site in the well-known Hell Creek Formation, containing numerous layers of thin sediment, creating a geological record of great detail.His advisor suggested seeking a similar site, closer to the K-Pg boundary layer. Of his discovery, DePalma said, "It's like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the . DePalma holds the lease to the Tanis site, which sits on private land, and controls access to it. The site, dubbed "Tanis," first underwent excavation in 2012, with DePalma and his team digging along a section known as the Hell Creek Formation (via Boredom Therapy). Sackler has three children Rebecca, Marianna, and David with his now ex-wife, Beth Sackler. Robert DePalma, a paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History and a graduate student at the University of Kansas, works at a fossil site in North Dakota. Th This explanation was proposed long before DePalma's discovery. The paleontologist who found extinction day fossils teases - Salon Still, people's ardor for this group of reptiles is so passionate that 12% of Americans surveyed in an Ipsos poll would resurrect T. rexes and the rest of these mysterious creatures if it were possible. Tanis is the only known site in the Hell Creek Formation where such conditions were met, [so] the deposit attests to the exceptional nature of the [Event]. [5] The fish were not bottom feeders. Sir David Attenborough is to examine the mystery of the dinosaurs' last days in a BBC1/PBS/France Tlvisions feature film that will unearth a dig site hidden in the hills of North Dakota. After his excavations at the Tanis site in North Dakota unearthed a huge trove of fish fossils that were likely blasted by the asteroid impact . DePalma did not respond to a Gizmodo request for comment, but he told Science, We absolutely would not, and have not ever, fabricated data and/or samples to fit this or another teams results., On December 9, a note was added to DePalmas paper on the Scientific Reports website. During and Ahlberg, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, question whether they exist. DePalma says his team also invited Durings team to join DePalmas ongoing study. How to Know If the Heat Is Making You Sick. During obtained extremely high-resolution x-ray images of the fossils at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France. This further evidences the violent nature of the event. In a 6 January letter to the journal editor handling his manuscript, which he forwarded to Science, DePalma acknowledged that the line graphs in his paper were plotted by hand instead of with graphing software, as is the norm in the field. A researcher claims that Robert DePalma published a faulty study in order to get ahead of her own work on the Tanis fossil site. TV Paleontologist Facing Backlash After Reportedly Faking Data Eiler agrees. Science and AAAS are working tirelessly to provide credible, evidence-based information on the latest scientific research and policy, with extensive free coverage of the pandemic. It is truly a magnificent site surely one of the best sites ever found for telling just what happened on the day of the impact. [20], Later discoveries included large primitive feathers 3040cm long with 3.5mm quills believed to come from large dinosaurs; broken remains from almost all known Hell Creek dinosaur groups, including some incredibly rare hatchling and intact egg with embryo fossils; fossil pterosaurs for which no other fossils exist at that time; drowned ant nests with ants inside and chambers filled with asteroid debris; and burrows of small mammals living at the site immediately after the impact. Some recent examples include the 1964 Alaskan earthquake (seiches in Puerto Rico),[14] the 1950 Assam-Tibet earthquake (India/China) (seiches in England and Norway), the 2010 Chile earthquake (seiches in Louisiana). Melanie During, a paleontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, submitted a paper for publication in the journal Nature in June 2021. Such Konservat-Lagersttten are rare because they require special depositional circumstances. [1]:p.8193 The original paper describes the river in technical detail:[1]:Fig.1 and p.9181-8193. He says the study published in Scientific Reports began long before During became interested in the topic and was published after extended discussions over publishing a joint paper went nowhere. Robert DePalma reveals the Tanis site discoveries he couldn't talk about in Part One. He says he did so because the isotopic data had been supplied as a non-digital data set by a collaborator, archaeologist Curtis McKinney of Miami Dade College, who died in 2017. Now, a different group of researchers is accusing the former group of faking their data; the journal that published the research has added an editors note to the paper saying the data is under review. TV tonight: watch out dinosaurs, that big asteroid is coming - and so [1]:p.8, Although Tanis and Chicxulub were connected by the remaining Interior Seaway, the massive water waves from the impact area were probably not responsible for the deposits at Tanis. Jan Smit first presented a paper describing the Tanis site, its association with the K-Pg boundary event and associated fossil discoveries, including the presence of glass spherules from the Chicxulub impact clustered in the gill rakers of acipenciform fishes and also found in amber. This had initially been a seaway between separate continents, but it had narrowed in the late Cretaceous to become, in effect, a large inland extension to the Gulf of Mexico. Tanis at the time was located on a river that may have drained into the shallow sea covering much of what is now the eastern and southern United States. In June 2021, paleontologist Melanie During submitted a manuscript to Nature that she suspected might create a minor scientific sensation. "The thing we can do is determine the likelihood that it died the day the meteor struck. "We're never going to say with 100 percent certainty that this leg came from an animal that died on that day," the scientist said to the publication. It needs to be explained. That same year, encouraged by a Dutch award for the thesis, she began to prepare a journal article. paper] may be fabricated, created to fit an already known conclusion. (She also posted the statement on the OSF Preprints server today.). "I just hope this hasn't been oversensationalized.". When the dino-killing asteroid struck Earth, shock waves would have caused a massive water surge in the shallows, researchers say, depositing sedimentary layers that entombed plants and animals killed in the event. Nicklas also indicates that "in 2012 we decided to try to find an academic paleontologist who had the necessary interest, time, and the ability to excavate the site A good friend of ours, Ronnie Frithiof, recommended Robert DePalma. Now, Robert DePalma, a paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History and a graduate student at the University of Kansas, claims to have unveiled an unprecedented time capsule of this . But others question DePalma's interpretations. More: Science Publisher Retracts 44 Papers for Being Utter Nonsense, We may earn a commission from links on this page. Raising the Bar: Chocolate's History, Art, and Taste With Sophia Contreras Rea [1]:p.8 Seiche waves often occur shortly after significant earthquakes, even thousands of miles away, and can be sudden and violent. Study leader Robert DePalma conducts field research at the Tanis site. The site, after all, does not conclusively prove that the asteroid's impact actually caused the dinosaurs' demise, reported Science. Artist's rendering of a large asteroid hitting Earth. In a recent article in The New Yorker, author Douglas Preston recounts his experience with paleontologist Robert DePalma, who uncovered some of the first evidence to settle these debates. It feels like a case of the dog ate my homework, and I dont think the relatives of Curtis McKinney deserve this, During told Gizmodo. Ritchie Hall | Earth, Energy & Environment Center 1414 Naismith Drive, Room 254 Lawrence, KS 66045 geology@ku.edu 785-864-4974 Since 2013, Sackler has resided at a private property on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. Robert DePalma (right) and Walter Alvarez (left) at the Tanis site in North Dakota. DePalma characterizes their interactions differently. The plotted line graphs and figures in DePalmas paper contain numerous irregularities, During and Ahlberg claimincluding missing and duplicated data points and nonsensical error barssuggesting they were manually constructed, rather than produced by data analysis software. Top editors give you the stories you want delivered right to your inbox each weekday. A meteor impact 66 million years ago generated a tsunami-like wave in an inland sea that killed and buried fish, mammals, insects and a dinosaur, the first victims of Earth's last mass extinction event.
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