paper] may be fabricated, created to fit an already known conclusion. (She also posted the statement on the OSF Preprints server today.). By Nicole Karlis Senior Writer. Additional fossils, including this beautifully preserved fish tail, have been found at the Tanis site in North Dakota. Robert DePalma made headlines again in 2021 with the discovery of a leg from a Thescelosaurus dinosaur at Tanis, reported The Washington Post. He later wrote a piece for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [1] Simultaneous media disclosure had been intended via the New Yorker, but the magazine learned that a rival newspaper had heard about the story, and asked permission to publish early to avoid being scooped by waiting until the paper was published. The chief editor of Scientific Reports, Rafal Marszalek, says the journal is aware of concerns with the paper and is looking into them. Some scientists question Robert DePalma's methods. Based on the . Recognizing the unique nature of the site, Nicklas and Sula brought in Robert DePalma, a University of Kansas graduate student, to perform additional excavations. We may earn a commission from links on this page. Dinosaurs continue to fascinate, even though they became extinct 65 million years ago. This is not a case of he said, she said. This is also not a case of stealing someones ideas. Perhaps no animal, living or dead, has captivated the world in the way that dinosaurs have. 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. The x-rays revealed tiny bits of glass called spherulesremnants of the shower of molten rock that would have been thrown from the impact site and rained down around the world. [15][1]:p.8. But During, a Ph.D. candidate at Uppsala University (UU), received a shock of her own in December 2021, while her paper was still under review. 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. The response doesnt satisfy During and Ahlberg, who want the paper retracted. [1]:p.8 Instead, the initial papers on Tanis conclude that much faster earthquake waves, the primary waves travelling through rock at about 5km/s (11,000mph),[1]:p.8 probably reached Hell Creek within six minutes, and quickly caused massive water surges known as seiches in the shallow waters close to Tanis. [13], The formation contains a series of fresh and brackish-water clays, mudstones, and sandstones deposited during the Maastrichtian and Danian (respectively, the end of the Cretaceous and the beginning of the Paleogene periods) by fluvial activity in fluctuating river channels and deltas and very occasional peaty swamp deposits along the low-lying eastern continental margin fronting the late Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway. The same day, Ahlberg tweeted that he and During submitted a complaint of potential research misconduct against DePalma and Phillip Manning, one of the papers co-authors, to the University of Manchester. "Outcrops like [this] are the reasons many of us are drawn to geology," says David Kring, a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, who wasn't a member of the research team. Eiler agrees. DePalma holds the lease to the Tanis site, which sits on private land, and controls access to it. Forum News Service, provided Some of the gripes occurred because DePalma first shared his story with a mainstream publication, The New Yorker, instead of a more academic-based journal, said Bored Therapy. The papers chief finding was that the large asteroid that slammed into Earth at the end of the Cretaceous struck in spring, a conclusion reached by studying fossilized fish found in North Dakota. [1]:Fig.1 and p.9181-8192 Although other flooding is evidenced in Hells Creek, the Tanis deposit does not appear to relate to any other Marine transgression (inland shoreline movement) known to have taken place. Help News from Science publish trustworthy, high-impact stories about research and the people who shape it. He has mined a fossil site in North Dakota secretly for years. Robert DePalma uncovers a preserved articulated body of a 65-million-year-old fish at Tanis. 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. [21], The site was originally a point bar - a gently sloped crescent-shaped area of deposit that accumulates on the inside bend of streams and rivers below the slip-off slope. [5] The fish were not bottom feeders. 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. 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 . Using the same formula, the Chicxulub earthquakes may have released up to 1412 times as much energy as the Chile event. He has mined a fossil site in North Dakota secretly for . 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. This directly applies to today. The Hell Creek Formation was at this time very low-lying or partly submerged land at the northern end of the seaway, and the Chicxulub impact occurred in the shallow seas at the southern end, approximately 3,050km (1,900mi) from the site. In the comment, During, her co-author Dennis Voeten, and her supervisor Per Ahlberg highlight anomalies in the other teams isotope analysis, a dearth of primary data, insufficiently described methods, and the fact that DePalmas team didnt specify the lab where the analyses were performed. But just one dinosaur bone is discussed in the PNAS studyand it is mentioned in a supplement document rather than in the paper itself. [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. View Obituary & Service Information "Robert has been meticulous, borderline archaeological in his excavation approach," says Manning, who has been working at Tanis from the beginning. ^Note 2 If two earthquakes have moment magnitudes M1 and M2, then the energy released by the second earthquake is about 101.5 x (M2 M1) times as much at the first. 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 . [citation needed], At the time of the Chicxulub impact, the present-day North American continent was still forming. A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 378, Issue 6625. A study published by paleontologist Robert DePalma in December last year concluded that dinosaurs went extinct during the springtime. DePalma did not respond to an email request for an interview. The fish contain isotope records and evidence of how the animals growth corresponded to the season (tree rings do the same thing). Its not clear where McKinney conducted these analyses, and raw data was not included in the published paper. DePalma believed that the fossils found in Tanis, which sat on the KT layer, became collected there just after the asteroid struck the earth. [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. It is not even clear whether the massive waves were able to traverse the entire Interior Seaway. But not everyone has fully embraced the find, perhaps in part because it was first announced to the world last week in an article in The New Yorker. 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. Trapped in the debris is a jumbled mess of fossils, including freshwater sturgeon that apparently choked to death on glassy particles raining out of the sky from the fireball lofted by the impact. The raw data are missing, he says, because the scientist who ran the analyses died years prior to the papers publication, and DePalma has been unable to recover them from his deceased collaborators laboratory. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. What's potentially so special about this site? DePalma also acknowledged that the manual transcription process resulted in some regrettable instances in which data points drifted from the correct values, but none of these examples changed the overall geometry of the plotted lines or affected their interpretation. McKinneys non-digital data set, he says, is viable for research work and remains within normal tolerances for usage.. The Byte reports that the amber was found 2,000 miles away from the asteroid crater off the coast of Mexico believed to be . As of April 2019, reported findings include: The hundreds of fish remains are distributed by size, and generally show evidence of tetany (a body posture related to suffocation in fish), suggesting strongly that they were all killed indiscriminately by a common suffocating cause that affected the entire population. DePalma's dinosaur study, published in Scientific Reports in December 2021, . Based on the chemical isotope signatures and bone growth patterns found in fossilized fish collected at Tanis, a renowned fossil site in North Dakota, During had concluded the asteroid that ended the dinosaur era 65 million years ago struck Earth when it was spring in the Northern Hemisphere. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. Top left, a shocked mineral from Tanis. Get more great content like this delivered right to you! We werent just near the KT boundary. 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. It features what appear to be scanned printouts of manually typed tables containing the isotopic data from the fish fossils. [3] DePalma then presented a paper describing excavation of a burrow created by a small mammal that had been made "immediately following the K-Pg impact" at Tanis. Such a conclusion might provide the best evidence yet that at least some dinosaurs were alive to witness the asteroid impact. If Tanis is all it is claimed to be, that debateand many others about this momentous day in Earth's historymay be over. Appropriate editorial action will be taken once this matter is resolved.. 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. [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. With the exception of some ectothermic species such as the ancestors of the modern leatherback sea turtle and crocodiles, no tetrapods weighing more than 25kg (55lb) survived. The site, after all, does not conclusively prove that the asteroid's impact actually caused the dinosaurs' demise, reported Science. He suggested that the impact caused huge seiches (or tsunamis), which allowed the mosasaur tooth to travel from fresh water to that spot, along with freshwater sturgeon that may have choked on glassy pieces from the collision, reported Science. During obtained extremely high-resolution x-ray images of the fossils at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France. Science journalism's obligation to truth. Bottom right, a small fragment of a marine annemite shell found in the freshwater Tanis deposit. That "disconnect" bothers Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. Many theories exist about why the dinosaurs disappeared from the Earth. Robert DePalma is a paleontologist who holds the lease to the Tanis site and controls access to it. "It's not just for paleo nerds. The 2023 Complete Python Certification Bootcamp Bundle, What Is Carbon Capture? The formation is named for early studies at Hell Creek, located near Jordan, Montana, and it was designated as a National Natural Landmark in 1966. 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. It comprises two layers with sand and silt grading (coarse sands at the bottom, finer silt/clay particles at the top). There was no advanced decay. These tables are not the same as raw data produced by the mass spectrometer named in the papers methods section, but DePalma noted the datas credibility had been verified by two outside researchers, paleontologist Neil Landman at the American Museum of Natural History and geochemist Kirk Cochran at Stony Brook University. DePalma made major headlines in March 2019, when a splashy New Yorker story revealed the Tanis site to the world. Until a few years ago, some researchers had suspected the last dinosaurs vanished thousands of years before the catastrophe. Bob was born in Newark, NJ on December 26, 1948 to the late James and Rose DePalma. That same year, encouraged by a Dutch award for the thesis, she began to prepare a journal article. With this deposit, we can chart what happened the day the Cretaceous died. And mass spectrometry revealed the paddlefishs fin bones had elevated levels of carbon-13, an isotope that is more abundant in modern paddlefishand presumably their closely related ancient relativesduring spring, when they eat more zooplankton rich in carbon-13. Comes with twelve different courses comprised of a huge number of lessons, and each one will help you learn more about Python itself, and can be accessed when you want and as often as you want forever, making it ideal for learning a new skill. Robert DePalma (right) and Walter Alvarez (left) at the Tanis site in North Dakota. However, two independent scientists who reviewed the data behind the paper shortly after its publication say they were satisfied with its authenticity and have no reason to distrust it. 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). His advisor suggested seeking a similar site, closer to the K-Pg boundary layer. Could NASA's Electric Airplane Make Aviation More Sustainable? Paleontologist accused of faking data in dino-killing asteroid paper. "I hope this is all legitI'm just not 100% convinced yet," says Thomas Tobin, a geologist at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. [18], DePalma began excavating systematically in 2012[1]:11 and quickly found the site to contain very unusual and promising features. There is considerable detail for times greater than hundreds of thousands of years either side of the event, and for certain kinds of change on either side of the K-Pg boundary layer. 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. When one paleontologist began excavating a dig site in the mountains of North Dakota, he soon discovered new dinosaur evidence that may change history. 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. Tanis is part of the heavily studied Hell Creek Formation, a group of rocks spanning four states in North America renowned for many significant fossil discoveries from the Upper Cretaceous and lower Paleocene. Tanis is a significant site because it appears to record the events from the first minutes until a few hours after the impact of the giant Chicxulub asteroid in extreme detail. After The New Yorker published "The Day the Dinosaurs Died," which details the discovery of a fossil site in Hell's Creek, North Dakota, by Robert DePalma a Kansas State PhD student and paleontologist, debates and discussions across the country arose over the article. Bde hans far och hans farfars bror var kirurger i Florida. 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. They presumably formed from droplets of molten rock launched into the atmosphere at the impact site, which cooled and solidified as they plummeted back to Earth. Everything he found had been covered so quickly that details were exceptionally well preserved, and the fossils as a whole formed a very unusual collection fish fins and complete fish, tree trunks with amber, fossils in upright rather than squashed flat positions, hundreds or thousands of cartilaginous fully articulated freshwater paddlefish, sturgeon and even saltwater mosasaurs which had ended up on the same mudbank miles inland (only about four fossilized fish were previously known from the entire Hell Creek formation), fragile body parts such as complete and intact tails, ripped from the seafish's bodies and preserved inland in a manner that suggested they were covered almost immediately after death, and everywhere millions of tiny spheres of glassy material known as microtektites, the result of tiny splatters of molten material reaching the ground. The three-metre problem encompasses that . ", Since Tanis became an excavation site, several other fossils were found, including a pterosaur embryo. A Triceratops or other ceratopsian ilium (hip bone) was found at the high water mark, in circumstances hinting that the dinosaur might speculatively have been a floating carcass and possibly alive at or just before impact,[5] but the paper describing such remains was still in progress as of 2019[6] the initial papers only include a photograph and its location within Tanis. The exceptional nature of the findings and conclusions have led some scientists to await further scrutiny by the scientific community before agreeing that the discoveries at Tanis have been correctly understood. DePalma has not made public the raw, machine-produced data underlying his analyses. Please make a tax-deductible gift today. A researcher claims that Robert DePalma published a faulty study in order to get ahead of her own work on the Tanis fossil site. Sackler has three children Rebecca, Marianna, and David with his now ex-wife, Beth Sackler. [18], 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. We're seeing mass die-offs of animals and biomes that are being put through very stressful situations worldwide. Still, when During submitted her manuscript to Nature on 22 June 2021, she listed DePalma as the studys second author. 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. Numerous famous fossils of plants and animals, including many types of dinosaur fossils, have been discovered there. Robert James DePalma, 71, a longtime Florida resident passed away Tuesday, May 12, 2020 at his residence in Fort Myers, FL. In June 2021, paleontologist Melanie During submitted a manuscript to Nature that she suspected might create a minor scientific sensation. Ive done quite a few excavations by now, and this was the most phenomenal site Ive ever worked on, During says. Three papers were published in 2021. Point bars are common in mature or meandering streams. [1]:p.8 Seiche waves often occur shortly after significant earthquakes, even thousands of miles away, and can be sudden and violent. . Ultimately, both studies, which appeared in print within weeks of each other, were complementary and mutually reinforcing, he says. The CretaceousPaleogene ("K-Pg" or "K-T") extinction event around 66 million years ago wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs and many other species. [5] Co-author Professor Phillip Manning, a specialist in fossil soft tissues,[19] described DePalma's working techniques at Tanis as "meticulous" and "borderline archaeological in his excavation approach". DePalma, now a Ph.D. student at the University of Manchester, vehemently denies any wrongdoing. In June 2021, paleontologist Melanie During submitted a manuscript to Nature that she suspected might create a minor scientific sensation. Part of the phenomenally fossil-rich Hell Creek Formation, Tanis sat on the shore of the ancient Western Interior Seaway some 65 million years ago. A researcher claims that Robert DePalma published a faulty study in order to get ahead of her own work on the Tanis fossil site. Fragile remains spanning the layers of debris show that the site was laid down in a single event over a short timespan. A A. Paleontologist Robert DePalma has done it again. Others defend DePalma, like his co-author, Mark Richards, a geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. "That some competitors have cast Robert in a negative light is unfortunate and unfair," Richards told Science. But it's not at the asteroid's crash site. The 1960 Valdivia Chile earthquake was the most powerful ever recorded, estimated at magnitude 9.4 to 9.6. These fossils were delivered for research to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. 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. Tanis is a site of paleontological interest in southwestern North Dakota, United States. Today, their fossils lie jumbled together at a site in North Dakota. The nerds travel to the final day of the dinosaurs reign with paleontologist Robert DePalma and the legendary Tanis Site. [20] The sediment appeared to have liquefied and covered the deposited biota, then quickly solidified, preserving much of the contents in three dimensions. They seem to have left the raw data out of the manuscript deliberately, he says. Robert DePalma is a paleontologist who holds the lease to the Tanis site and controls access to it.. The latter paper was published by a team led by Robert DePalma, Durings former collaborator and a paleontologist now at the University of Manchester. The paleontologist believed that this new information further supported the theory that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs along with 75 percent of the animals and plants on Earth 66 million year . As detailed by Science, the isotopic data in DePalmas paper was collected by archaeologist Curtis McKinney, who died in 2017. November 5, 2015. 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Robert DePalma Frederich Cichocki Manuel Dierick Robert Feeney: JPS.C.10.0001: Volume 1, 2007 "How to Make a Fossil: Part 2 - Dinosaur Mummies and Other Soft Tissue" . Subscribe to News from Science for full access to breaking news and analysis on research and science policy. 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. [1]:p.8193 The original paper describes the river in technical detail:[1]:Fig.1 and p.9181-8193. The media article was published several days before an accompanying research paper on the site came out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. According to The New Yorker, DePalma also sports some off-putting paleontology practices, like keeping his discovery secret for so long and limiting other scientists' access to the site. Robert DePalma reveals the Tanis site discoveries he couldn't talk about in Part One. "He could have stumbled on something amazing, but he has a reputation for making a lot out of a little.". (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.). Dont yet have access? But McKinneys former department chair, Pablo Sacasa, says he is not aware of McKinney ever collaborating with laboratories at other institutions. DePalma and his group knew the creature could not have survived in North Dakota's fresh waters during the prehistoric age. The mud and sand are dotted with glassy spherulesmany caught in the gills of the fishisotopically dated to 65.8 million years ago. JPS.C.2021.0002: The Paleontology, Geology and Taphonomy of the Tooth Draw Deposit; Hell Creek Formation (Maastrictian), Butte County, South Dakota. Robert DEPALMA, Postgraduate Researcher | Cited by 253 | of The University of Manchester, Manchester | Read 18 publications | Contact Robert DEPALMA Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. Some scientists were not happy with this proposal. If I were the editor, I would retract the paper unless [the raw data] were produced posthaste, he says. DePalma and his colleagues have been working at Tanis since 2012. Isaac Schultz. There is still much unknown about these prehistoric animals. Robert DePalma made headlines again in 2021 with the discovery of a leg from a Thescelosaurus dinosaur at Tanis, reported The Washington Post. An aspiring novelist, he attended The Ohio State University studying English and Bottom left, micro-CT image showing cutaway of clay-altered ejecta spherule with internal core of unaltered impact glass. 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. Asked where McKinney conducted his isotopic analyses, DePalma did not provide an answer. The Tanis site was first identified in 2008 and has been the focus of fieldwork by paleontologist Robert DePalma since .
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