Their team successfully removed fossil field jackets that contained articulated sturgeons, paddlefish, and bowfins. She and her supervisor, UU paleontologist Per Ahlberg, have shared their concerns with Science, and on 3 December, During posted a statement on the journal feedback website PubPeer claiming, we are compelled to ask whether the data [in the DePalma et al. "I'm suspicious of the findings. Could NASA's Electric Airplane Make Aviation More Sustainable? DePalma took over excavation rights on it several years ago from commercial fossil prospectors who discovered the site in 2008. 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. Michael Price is associatenews editor for Science, primarily covering anthropology, archaeology, and human evolution. Asked where McKinney conducted his isotopic analyses, DePalma did not provide an answer. A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 378, Issue 6625. When I saw [microtektites in their own impact craters], I knew this wasnt just any flood deposit. 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. 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. [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. 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. "Those few meters of rock record the wrath of the Chicxulub impact and the devastation it caused." 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. Even as a child, DePalma wondered what the Cretaceous was like. 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. [citation needed], At the time of the Chicxulub impact, the present-day North American continent was still forming. 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. But McKinneys former department chair, Pablo Sacasa, says he is not aware of McKinney ever collaborating with laboratories at other institutions. Melanie During, a paleontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, submitted a paper for publication in the journal Nature in June 2021. "It's not just for paleo nerds. Underneath a freshwater paddlefish skeleton, a mosasaur tooth appeared. The deposit may also provide some of the strongest evidence yet that nonbird dinosaurs were still thriving on impact day. 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. Robert A. DePalma, a paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History and a graduate student at the University of Kansas. With David Attenborough, Robert DePalma, Phillip Manning. 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. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. [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. Both Landman and Cochran confirmed to Science they had reviewed the data supplied by DePalma in January, apparently following Scientific Reportss request for additional clarification on the issues raised by During and Ahlberg immediately after the papers publication. Of his discovery, DePalma said, "It's like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the . 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. 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. This program was also aired as "Dinosaur Apocalypse: The Last Day" on PBS Nova starting 11 May 2022.[9][32]. Robert DePalma reveals the Tanis site discoveries he couldn't talk about in Part One. ", A North Dakota Excavation Had One Paleontologist Rethinking The Dinosaurs' Extinction, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Dont yet have access? The end-Cretaceous Chicxulub impact triggered Earth's last mass-extinction, extinguishing ~ 75% of species diversity and facilitating a global ecological shift to mammal-dominated biomes. If Tanis is all it is claimed to be, that debateand many others about this momentous day in Earth's historymay be over. 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. During visited Tanis in 2017, when she was a masters student at the Free University of Amsterdam. [1]:p.8 Seiche waves often occur shortly after significant earthquakes, even thousands of miles away, and can be sudden and violent. Isaac Schultz. 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. A fossil, after all, is only created under precise circumstances, with the dinosaur dying in a place that could preserve its remains in rock. paper] may be fabricated, created to fit an already known conclusion. (She also posted the statement on the OSF Preprints server today.). 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. [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]. Since 2012, paleontologist Robert DePalma has been excavating a site in North Dakota that he thinks is "an incredible and unprecedented discovery". Paleontologist Jack Horner, who had to revise his theory that the T. rex was solely a scavenger based on a previous finding from DePalma, told the New Yorker he didn't remember who DePalma was . 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 . 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. 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.. The claim is the Tanis creatures were killed and entombed on the actual day a giant asteroid struck Earth. In fact, there are probably dinosaur types that still remain unidentified, reported Smithsonian Magazine. Some scientists question Robert DePalma's methods. 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. It needs to be explained. "That's the first ever evidence of the interaction between life on the last day of the Cretaceous and the impact event," team member Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, told the publication. [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. "I've been asked, 'Why should we care about this? 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 . He has mined a fossil site in North Dakota secretly for years. 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. What's potentially so special about this site? . Impact Theory of Mass Extinctions and the Invertebrate Fossil Record, The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary. "That some competitors have cast Robert in a negative light is unfortunate and unfair," says another co-author, Mark Richards, a geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. [8] The site continues to be explored. To verify the study's claims, paleontologists say that DePalma must broaden access to the site and its material. 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. 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. 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. Notably, the powerful magnitude 9.0 9.1 Thoku earthquake in 2011, slower secondary waves traveled over 8,000km (5,000mi) in less than 30 minutes to cause seiches around 1.51.8m (4.95.9ft) high in Norway. 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.. Robert DePalma is a paleontologist who holds the lease to the Tanis site and controls access to it. It features what appear to be scanned printouts of manually typed tables containing the isotopic data from the fish fossils. From the size of the deposits beneath the flood debris, the Tanis River was a "deep and large" river with a point bar that was towards the larger size found in Hell's Creek, suggesting a river tens or hundreds of meters wide. Using the same formula, the Chicxulub earthquakes may have released up to 1412 times as much energy as the Chile event. During the long process of discussing these options they decided to submit their paper, he says. Images: Top right, Robert DePalma and Peter Larson conduct field research in Tanis. . Retaliation is also prohibited by university policy. During and Ahlberg, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, question whether they exist. When we look at the preservation of the leg and the skin around the articulated bones, we're talking on the day of impact or right before. 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. Robert DePalma, a curator at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History, found some rare fossils close to Bowman, North Dakota, in 2013 that led to a hypothesis of his own. 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. [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 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 Robert DePalma excavating a tangle of plant and animal fossils at the Tanis site in North Dakota. This dinosaur, a giant reptilian, lived during the Early Cretaceous period in oceans. We absolutely would not, and have not ever, fabricated data and/or samples to fit this or another teams results, he wrote in an email to Science. "It saddens me that folks are so quick to knock a study," he says. Top left, a shocked mineral from Tanis. With this deposit, we can chart what happened the day the Cretaceous died. "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. 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. A bad day for dinosaurs was the subject of an engaging hour-and-a-half for both paleontologists and NASA researchers. Other geologists say they can't shake a sense of suspicion about DePalma himself, who, along with his Ph.D. work, is also a curator at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History in Wellington, Florida. Others later pointed out that the reconstructed skeleton includes a bone that really belonged to a turtle; DePalma and his colleagues issued a correction. By Dave Kindy. . DePalma did not respond to an email request for an interview. 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). Both papers made their conclusions based on analysis of fish remains at the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota. The paper cleared peer review at PNAS within about 4 months. The co-authors included Walter Alvarez and Jan Smit, both renowned experts on the K-Pg impact and extinction. The paleontologist believed that this new information further supported the theory that an asteroid . 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. Traduzioni in contesto per "i paleontologi che" in italiano-inglese da Reverso Context: Ma i paleontologi che studiano dettagliatamente i denti fossilizzati di questi animali hanno sospettato che non erano quello semplice. The email, which came after Science started to inquire about the case, says their concerns remain under investigation. Douglas Preston's writing about the discovery lauds it as one of the . Robert James DePalma, 71, a longtime Florida resident passed away Tuesday, May 12, 2020 at his residence in Fort Myers, FL. The deposit itself is about 1.3m thick, sharply overlaying the point bar, in a drape-like manner. That same year, encouraged by a Dutch award for the thesis, she began to prepare a journal article. The site, after all, does not conclusively prove that the asteroid's impact actually caused the dinosaurs' demise, reported Science. 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. (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.). though Robert DePalma's love of the dead and buried was anything but . An imagined dinosaur scene just after the asteroid strike that caused a mass extinction, from . 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. If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that we cannot wait for a crisis to respond. 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. The chief editor of Scientific Reports, Rafal Marszalek, says the journal is aware of concerns with the paper and is looking into them. All of these factors seemed strange and confused the paleontologists. DePalma characterizes their interactions differently. 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. This is misconduct, During wrote in an email to Gizmodo. [15][1]:p.8. The 1960 Valdivia Chile earthquake was the most powerful ever recorded, estimated at magnitude 9.4 to 9.6. Disbelievers of this supposition, though, point to the lack of fossils in the KT layer as proof that this thesis is false more fossils are discovered some 10 feet underneath the layer. Th Last modified on Fri 8 Apr 2022 11.20 EDT. Robert A. DePalma1,2, David A. Burnham2,*, Larry D. Martin2,, Peter L. Larson 3 and Robert T. Bakker 4 1 Department of Vertebrate Paleontology, The Palm Beach Museum of Natural History, Fort Lauderdale, Florida; 2 University of Kansas Bio- DePalma and his colleagues have been working at Tanis since 2012. All rights reserved. Could it be a comet, asteroid, or meteor that crashed into the planet, and the reverberations ended the reign of the dinosaurs? DePalma, now a Ph.D. student at the University of Manchester, vehemently denies any wrongdoing. September 20, 2021. 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.
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