Paleontologist Accused of Making Up Data on Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Was it a fierce volcanic eruption that toppled these creatures? Th Other papers describing the site and its fossils are in progress. Both papers made their conclusions based on analysis of fish remains at the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota. After his team learned about Durings plan to submit a paper, DePalma says, one of his colleagues strongly advised During that the paper must at minimum acknowledge the teams earlier work and include DePalmas name as a co-author. Credit. It's at a North Dakota cattle ranch, some 2,000 miles (3,220 km) away. 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. 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 . 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. [5] The microtektites were present and concentrated in the gills of about 50% of the fossilized fish, in amber, and buried in the small pits in the mud which they had made when they contemporaneously impacted. [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. 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. At Tanis, unlike any other known Lagersttte site, it appears freak circumstances allowed for the preservation of exquisite, moment-by-moment details caused by the impact event. Robert DePalma - Wikipedia An aspiring novelist, he attended The Ohio State University studying English and There was a fossil everywhere I turned., After she returned to Amsterdam, During asked DePalma to send her the samples she had dug up, mostly sturgeon fossils. "I'm suspicious of the findings. 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. The co-authors included Walter Alvarez and Jan Smit, both renowned experts on the K-Pg impact and extinction. The study of these creatures is limited to the fossils they left behind and those provide an incomplete picture. November 5, 2015. This is misconduct, During wrote in an email to Gizmodo. Robert DePalma | KU Geology - University Of Kansas The deposit may also provide some of the strongest evidence yet that nonbird dinosaurs were still thriving on impact day. 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. Vid fyra rs lder fick han p ett museum . [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". New Evidence Shows Experts Have Dinosaurs' Extinction All Wrong [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. 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. It features what appear to be scanned printouts of manually typed tables containing the isotopic data from the fish fossils. With David Attenborough, Robert DePalma, Phillip Manning. Both papers studied 66-million-year-old paddlefish jawbones and sturgeon fin spines from Tanis. They had breathed in early debris that fell into water, in the seconds or minutes before death. Robert DePalmashown here giving a talk at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Aprilpublished a paper in December 2021 showing the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs struck Earth in the spring. Subscribe to News from Science for full access to breaking news and analysis on research and science policy. A fossil site in North Dakota records a stunningly detailed picture of the devastation minutes after an asteroid slammed into Earth about 66 million years ago, a group of paleontologists argue in a paper due out this week. Instead, much faster seismic waves from the magnitude 10 11.5 earthquakes[1]:p.8 probably reached the Hell Creek area as soon as ten minutes after the impact, creating seiche waves between 10100m (33328ft) high in the Western Interior Seaway. 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]. Paleontologist accused of faking data in dino-killing asteroid paper He did send Science a document containing what he says are McKinneys data. [31][18], A BBC documentary on Tanis, titled Dinosaurs: The Final Day, with Sir David Attenborough, was broadcast on 15 April 2022. Tanis is a rich fossil site that contains a bevy of marine creatures that apparently died in the immediate fallout of the asteroid impact, or the KT extinction. That same year, encouraged by a Dutch award for the thesis, she began to prepare a journal article. Dinosaurs continue to fascinate, even though they became extinct 65 million years ago. During, whose paper was accepted by Nature shortly afterward and published in February, suspects that DePalma, eager to claim credit for the finding, wanted to scoop herand made up the data to stake his claim. He says his team came up with the idea of using fossils isotopic signals to hunt for evidence of the asteroid impacts season long ago, and During adopted it after learning about it during her Tanis visita notion During rejects. In fact, there are probably dinosaur types that still remain unidentified, reported Smithsonian Magazine. While some lived near a river, lake, lagoon, or another place where sediment was found, many thrived in other habitats. "I just hope this hasn't been oversensationalized.". A thin layer of bone cells on sturgeons fins thickens each spring and thins in the fall, providing a kind of seasonal metronome; the x-rays revealed these layers were just beginning to thicken when the animals met their end, pointing to a springtime impact. 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. The site was systematically excavated by Robert DePalma over several years beginning in 2012, working in near total secrecy. [25] The last was published in December in Scientific Reports. Robert has been an Adjunct Professor in the Geosciences . Its not clear where McKinney conducted these analyses, and raw data was not included in the published paper. Douglas Preston's writing about the discovery lauds it as one of the . In December 2021, a team of paleontologists published data . Some scientists cite the KT layer a 66-million-year-old section of earth present through most of the world, with a high iridium level as proof that this is so. DePalma holds the lease to the Tanis site, which sits on private land, and controls access to it. 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. The claim is the Tanis creatures were killed and entombed on the actual day a giant asteroid struck Earth. The excavated pointbar and event deposits show that the point bar had been exposed to the air for a considerable time, with evidence of habitation and filled burrows, before an abrupt, turbulent, high energy event filled these burrows and laid down the deposits. 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. In June 2021, paleontologist Melanie During submitted a manuscript to Nature that she suspected might create a minor scientific sensation. The Hell Creek Formation is a well-known and much-studied fossil-bearing formation (geological region) of mostly Upper Cretaceous and some lower Paleocene rock, that stretches across portions of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming in North America. Ive done quite a few excavations by now, and this was the most phenomenal site Ive ever worked on, During says. The Tanis site was first identified in 2008 and has been the focus of fieldwork by paleontologist Robert DePalma since . Study leader Robert DePalma conducts field research at the Tanis site. Bottom right, a small fragment of a marine annemite shell found in the freshwater Tanis deposit. Special to The Forum. But just one dinosaur bone is discussed in the PNAS studyand it is mentioned in a supplement document rather than in the paper itself. The 1960 Valdivia Chile earthquake was the most powerful ever recorded, estimated at magnitude 9.4 to 9.6. Since 2012, paleontologist Robert DePalma has been excavating a site in North Dakota that he thinks is "an incredible and unprecedented discovery". Fossils from dinosaurs and other animals from thousands of years before the asteroid impact are very hard to come by, leading some to believe . Shards of Asteroid That Killed the Dinosaurs May Have Been Found in During the long process of discussing these options they decided to submit their paper, he says. A field assistant, Rudy Pascucci, left, and the paleontologist Robert DePalma, right, at DePalma's dig site. 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. Dinosaur Fossil From Day Extinction Asteroid Hit Earth - Insider [citation needed], At the time of the Chicxulub impact, the present-day North American continent was still forming. Some scientists were not happy with this proposal. By looking through this window into the past, we can apply these lessons to today. [1]:p.8193 The original paper describes the river in technical detail:[1]:Fig.1 and p.9181-8193. Images: Top right, Robert DePalma and Peter Larson conduct field research in Tanis. Isaac Schultz. 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 . Over the next 2 years, During says she made repeated attempts to discuss authorship with DePalma, but he declined to join her paper. She also removed DePalma as an author from her own manuscript, then under review at Nature. In December 2021, DePalma and his colleagues published an important paper . 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. "That some competitors have cast Robert in a negative light is unfortunate and unfair," Richards told Science. THE DAY THE CRETACEOUS ENDED - Magzter [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. The 2023 Complete Python Certification Bootcamp Bundle, What Is Carbon Capture? "He could have stumbled on something amazing, but he has a reputation for making a lot out of a little.". Fish were swept up in mud and sand in the aftermath of a great wave sparked by the Chicxulub impact, paleontologists say. Scarred Duckbill Dinosaur Escaped T. Rex Attack - National Geographic . The nerds travel to the final day of the dinosaurs reign with paleontologist Robert DePalma and the legendary Tanis Site. Episode . 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. During described the findings in her 2018 masters thesis, a copy of which she shared with DePalma in February 2019. But relatively little fossil evidence is available from times nearer the crucial event, a difficulty known as the "Three metre problem". DePalma and his colleagues have been working at Tanis since 2012. 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. If the team, led by Robert DePalma, a graduate student in paleontology at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, is correct, it has uncovered a record of apocalyptic destruction 3000 kilometers from Chicxulub. The paleontologist who found extinction day fossils teases - Salon Tanis is a site of paleontological interest in southwestern North Dakota, United States. Even as a child, DePalma wondered what the Cretaceous was like. Robert DEPALMA | Postgraduate Researcher | The University of Manchester Paleo Nerds: A Prehistoric Podcast | Paleo Nerds This is not a case of he said, she said. This is also not a case of stealing someones ideas. An imagined dinosaur scene just after the asteroid strike that caused a mass extinction, from . The event included waves with at least 10 meters run-up height (the vertical distance a wave travels after it reaches land). 66 million-year-old deathbed linked to dinosaur-killing meteor Astonishment, skepticism greet fossils claimed to record dinosaur-killing asteroid impact. During visited Tanis in 2017, when she was a masters student at the Free University of Amsterdam. The former Purdue President is now 76 years of age. 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. Contributions to The Journal of Paleontological Sciences But no one has found direct evidence of its lethal effects. Her former collaborator Robert DePalma, whom she had listed as second author on the study, published a paper of his own in Scientific Reports reaching essentially the same conclusion, based on an entirely separate data set. 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. These dimensions are in the upper size range for point bars in the Hell Creek Formation and compare favorably with modern rivers with large channels that are tens to hundreds of meters wide", "[The Event flood deposits are] indicative of a westward or inland flow direction that is opposite of the natural (ancient) current of the Tanis River", "[The] Event Deposit is restricted to (an ancient) river valley and is conspicuously absent from the adjacent floodplains. 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. If they can provide the raw data, its just a sloppy paper. A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 378, Issue 6625. Artist's rendering of a large asteroid hitting Earth. ", "Tanis exhibits a depositional scenario that was unusual in being highly conducive to exceptional (largely three dimensional) preservation of many articulated carcasses (Konservat-Lagersttte). DePalma gave the name Tanis to both the site and the river. 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. The response doesnt satisfy During and Ahlberg, who want the paper retracted. Sackler has three children Rebecca, Marianna, and David with his now ex-wife, Beth Sackler. His advisor suggested seeking a similar site, closer to the K-Pg boundary layer. Paleontologist Accused of Making Up Data on Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid 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. 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. Robert DePalma. DePalma made major headlines in March 2019, when a splashy New Yorker story revealed the Tanis site to the world. 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. DePalma did not respond to an email request for an interview. 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. Searching in the hills of North Dakota, palaeontologist Robert DePalma makes an incredible . [17] This would resolve conflicting evidence that huge water movements had occurred in the Hell Creek region near Tanis much less than an hour after impact, although the first megatsunamis from the impact zone could not have arrived at the site for almost a full day. He is survived by his loving wife,. According to the Science article, During suspects that DePalma, eager to claim credit for the finding, wanted to scoop herand made up the data to stake his claim.. Paleontologist Robert DePalma, featured in PBS's "Dinosaur Apocalypse," discusses an astonishing trove of fossils. By Robert Sanders, Media relations | March 29, 2019. At his suggestion, she wrote a formal letter to Scientific Reports. Robert DEPALMA, Postgraduate Researcher | Cited by 253 | of The University of Manchester, Manchester | Read 18 publications | Contact Robert DEPALMA It is not even clear whether the massive waves were able to traverse the entire Interior Seaway. 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. It could be just one factor in a series of environmental events that led to their extinction. In turn, the fish remains revealed the season their lives endedergo, the precise timing of the devastating asteroid strike to the Yucatn Peninsula. ^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. Scientists may have found fragments of THE asteroid that wiped out the When one paleontologist began excavating a dig site in the mountains of North Dakota, he soon discovered new dinosaur evidence that may change history. The fact that spherules were found in the fishes gills suggested the animals died in the minutes to hours after the impact. In lieu of controversial New Yorker article, UCD Professor weighs in on DePalma's team argues that as seismic waves from the distant impact reached Tanis minutes later, the shaking generated 10-meter waves that surged from the sea up the river valley, dumping sediment and both marine and freshwater organisms there. "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. The situation was first reported by the publication Science last month. After trying to discuss the matter with editors at Scientific Reports for nearly a year, During recently decided to make her suspicions public. TV Paleontologist Facing Backlash After Reportedly Faking Data Kansas University, via Agence France-Presse Getty Images How to interpret the new dinosaur fossil graveyard study - Quartz "No one is an expert on all of those subjects," he says, so it's going to take a few months for the research community to digest the findings and evaluate whether they support such extraordinary conclusions. Geologists have theorized that the impact, near what is now the town of Chicxulub on Mexico's Yucatn Peninsula, played a role in the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, when all the dinosaurs (except birds) and much other life on Earth vanished. Based on the . Please make a tax-deductible gift today. "After a while, we decided it wasn't a good route to go down," he says. But there were other inconsistencies at the excavation site the fossils they found seemed out of place, with some skeletons located in vertical positions. [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. 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Robert DePalma uncovers a preserved articulated body of a 65-million-year-old fish at Tanis. 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). Abstract - Nasa . [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. The University of Kansas prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, national origin, age, ancestry, disability, status as a veteran, sexual orientation, marital status, parental status, gender identity, gender expression, and genetic information in the university's programs and activities. 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. A A. Paleontologist Robert DePalma has done it again. Scientists find fossil of dinosaur 'killed on day of asteroid strike' Tanis: Fossil found of dinosaur killed in asteroid strike - BBC If the data were generated in a stable isotope lab, that lab had a desktop computer that recorded results, he says, and they should still be available. The findings each preclude correlation with either the Cantapeta or Breien, This page was last edited on 25 February 2023, at 16:30. 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. Raising the Bar: Chocolate's History, Art, and Taste With Sophia Contreras Rea Cochran says the format of the isotopic data does not appear unusual. 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. . Bob was born in Newark, NJ on December 26, 1948 to the late James and Rose DePalma. 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. posted a statement on the journal feedback website PubPeer, a document containing what he says are McKinneys data, Earliest evidence of horseback riding found in eastern cowboys, Funding woes force 500 Women Scientists to scale back operations, Lawmakers offer contrasting views on how to compete with China in science, U.K. scientists hope to regain access to EU grants after Northern Ireland deal, Astronomers stumble in diplomatic push to protect the night sky, Satellites spoiling more and more Hubble images, Pablo Neruda was poisoned to death, a new forensic report suggests, Europes well-preserved bog bodies surrender their secrets, Teens leukemia goes into remission after experimental gene-editing therapy, Paleontologist accused of fraud in paper on dino-killing asteroid, Scientist-Consultants Accuse OSI of Missing the Pattern, Journal will not retract influential paper by botanist accused of plagiarism and fraud. The latter paper was published by a team led by Robert DePalma, Durings former collaborator and a paleontologist now at the University of Manchester. And, if they are not forthcoming, there are numerous precedents for the retraction of scholarly articles on that basis alone.. Also, there is little evidence on the detailed effects of the event on Earth and its biosphere. 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. [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. Robert DePalma: We know there would have been a tremendous air blast from the impact and probably a loud roaring noise accompanied with that similar to standing next to a 747 jet on the runway.

Former Katv News Anchors, Watertown, Ma Police Chief, Can I Scan My Lottery Ticket On My Phone, Articles R