[30] However, the journal later published a note in December 2022 stating that "the reliability of data presented in this manuscript [] currently in question" following claims that data in the paper was fabricated in order to scoop a later paper[18] published in Nature February 2022 (but submitted before the Scientific Reports paper was submitted), by a separate team, which also studied the fish skeletons found at Tanis, and also identified annual cyclical changes, and found that the impact had occurred in spring. 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. 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 . In June 2021, paleontologist Melanie During submitted a . "He could have stumbled on something amazing, but he has a reputation for making a lot out of a little.". He is survived by his loving wife,. There was no advanced decay. Bob was born in Newark, NJ on December 26, 1948 to the late James and Rose DePalma. 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. 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. We may earn a commission from links on this page. Robert DePalma is a vertebrate paleontologist, based out of Florida Atlantic University (FAU), whose focus on terrestrial life of the late Cretaceous, the Chicxulub asteroid impact, and the evolution of theropod dinosaurs, was sparked by a passionate fascination with the past. If they can provide the raw data, its just a sloppy paper. . Searching in the hills of North Dakota, palaeontologist Robert DePalma makes an incredible . 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. 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. We're seeing mass die-offs of animals and biomes that are being put through very stressful situations worldwide. Melanie During suspects Robert DePalma wanted to claim credit for identifying the dinosaur-killing asteroid's season of impact and fabricated data in order to be able to publish a paper . A wealth of other evidence has persuaded most researchers that the impact played some role in the extinctions. They're perfectly preserved, Robert DePalma, paleontologist, via CNN. American, said in a 2019 tweet that the findings from the site "have met with a good deal of skepticism from the paleontology community." . 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. Dont yet have access? The paper cleared peer review at PNAS within about 4 months. At the site, called Tanis, the researchers say they have discovered the chaotic debris left when tsunamilike waves surged up a river valley. 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. Ritchie Hall | Earth, Energy & Environment Center 1414 Naismith Drive, Room 254 Lawrence, KS 66045 geology@ku.edu 785-864-4974 Please make a tax-deductible gift today. (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. Paleontologist Robert DePalma, featured in PBS's "Dinosaur Apocalypse," discusses an astonishing trove of fossils. September 20, 2021. Robert DePalma r son till tandkirurgen Robert De Plama Sr i Delray Beach. DePalma did not respond to an email request for an interview. 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. [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. [31][18], A BBC documentary on Tanis, titled Dinosaurs: The Final Day, with Sir David Attenborough, was broadcast on 15 April 2022. Han var redan som barn fascinerad av ben. Such Konservat-Lagersttten are rare because they require special depositional circumstances. [18], DePalma began excavating systematically in 2012[1]:11 and quickly found the site to contain very unusual and promising features. Gizmodo covered the research at the time. 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. A bad day for dinosaurs was the subject of an engaging hour-and-a-half for both paleontologists and NASA researchers. "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. ", "Tanis exhibits a depositional scenario that was unusual in being highly conducive to exceptional (largely three dimensional) preservation of many articulated carcasses (Konservat-Lagersttte). Tobin says the PNAS paper is densely packed with detail from paleontology, sedimentology, geochemistry, and more. 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 . Based on the . It is not even clear whether the massive waves were able to traverse the entire Interior Seaway. DePalma took over excavation rights on it several years ago from commercial fossil prospectors who discovered the site in 2008. This directly applies to today. 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. 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. He had already named the genus Dakotaraptor when others identified it as belonging to a prehistoric turtle. 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. But McKinneys former department chair, Pablo Sacasa, says he is not aware of McKinney ever collaborating with laboratories at other institutions. 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. 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. Every summer, for the past eight years, paleontologist Robert de Palma and a caravan of colleagues drive 2,257 miles from Boca Raton to the sleepy North Dakota town of Bowman. The paper, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), does not include all the scientific claims mentioned in The New Yorker story, including that numerous dinosaurs as well as fish were buried at the site. His reputation suffered when, in 2015, he and his colleagues described a new genus of dinosaur named Dakotaraptor, found in a site close to Tanis. Since 2013, Sackler has resided at a private property on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. Petrified fish with glass spheres, called ejecta, were also at the site. The claim is the Tanis creatures were killed and entombed on the actual day a giant asteroid struck Earth. 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. . Fish were swept up in mud and sand in the aftermath of a great wave sparked by the Chicxulub impact, paleontologists say. The lead author of that paper, and of the 2021 Scientific Reports paper, is Robert DePalma, a paleontologist who was the central character in a lengthy story published by The New Yorker a day . 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. One of these is whether dinosaurs were already declining at the time of the event due to ongoing volcanic climate change. 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. After trying to discuss the matter with editors at Scientific Reports for nearly a year, During recently decided to make her suspicions public. Episode #52: Your Mother Was a Vetulicolian and Your Father Smelt of Elderberries with Henry Gee . [1]:pg.11 Key findings were presented in two conference papers in October 2017. Three papers were published in 2021. Help News from Science publish trustworthy, high-impact stories about research and the people who shape it. . Discoveries shed new light on the day the dinosaurs died. All rights reserved. Images: Top right, Robert DePalma and Peter Larson conduct field research in Tanis. Science journalism's obligation to truth. The bottom line is that this case will just involve bluster and smoke-blowing until the authors produce a primary record of their lab work, adds John Eiler, a geochemist and isotope analysis expert at the California Institute of Technology. This impact, which struck the Gulf of Mexico 66.043 million years ago, wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs and many other species (the so-called "K-Pg" or "K-T" extinction). "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. 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. "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. 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. 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 seasonspringtime, 66 million years agothanks to an analysis of fossilized fish remains at a famous site in North Dakota. 2 / 4: Robert A. DePalma, a paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History and a graduate student at the University of Kansas. 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. Recognizing the unique nature of the site, Nicklas and Sula brought in Robert DePalma, a University of Kansas graduate student, to perform additional excavations. Using the same formula, the Chicxulub earthquakes may have released up to 1412 times as much energy as the Chile event. The site was systematically excavated by Robert DePalma over several years beginning in 2012, working in near total secrecy. 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. But just one dinosaur bone is discussed in the PNAS studyand it is mentioned in a supplement document rather than in the paper itself. . This is misconduct, During wrote in an email to Gizmodo. DePalma and his group knew the creature could not have survived in North Dakota's fresh waters during the prehistoric age. The paleontologist believed that this new information further supported the theory that an asteroid killed the dinosaursalong with 75 percent of the animals and plants on Earth 66 million year ago. 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. Even as a child, DePalma wondered what the Cretaceous was like. 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. "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. We werent just near the KT boundary. 03/30/2022. Tanis is a site of paleontological interest in southwestern North Dakota, United States. A researcher claims that Robert DePalma published a faulty study in order to get ahead of her own work on the Tanis fossil site. With Gizmodos Molly Taft | Techmodo. [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. Most of central North America had recently been a large shallow seaway, called the Western Interior Seaway (also known as the North American Sea or the Western Interior Sea), and parts were still submerged. "I just hope this hasn't been oversensationalized.". DePalma characterizes their interactions differently. Schoene and some others believe environmental turmoil caused by large-scale volcanic activity in what is now central India may have taken a toll even before the impact. 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 extinction event caused by this impact began the Cenozoic, in which mammals - including humans - would eventually come to dominate life on Earth. This program was also aired as "Dinosaur Apocalypse: The Last Day" on PBS Nova starting 11 May 2022.[9][32]. Was it a fierce volcanic eruption that toppled these creatures? By looking through this window into the past, we can apply these lessons to today. Does fossil site record dino-killing impact? It could be just one factor in a series of environmental events that led to their extinction. Study leader Robert DePalma conducts field research at the Tanis site. 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. Any water-borne waves would have arrived between 18 and 26 hours later,[1]:p.24 long after the microtektites had already fallen back to earth, and far too late to leave the geological record found at the site. 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. "I've been asked, 'Why should we care about this? [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. 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 co-authors included Walter Alvarez and Jan Smit, both renowned experts on the K-Pg impact and extinction. DePalma holds the lease to the Tanis site, which sits on private land, and controls access to it. "The thing we can do is determine the likelihood that it died the day the meteor struck. The first two were conference papers presented in January of that year. 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. though Robert DePalma's love of the dead and buried was anything but . During visited Tanis in 2017, when she was a masters student at the Free University of Amsterdam. He reportedly helps fund his fieldwork by selling replicas of his finds to private collectors. Help News from Science publish trustworthy, high-impact stories about research and the people who shape it. ", A North Dakota Excavation Had One Paleontologist Rethinking The Dinosaurs' Extinction, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It saddens me that folks are so quick to knock a study," he says. If I were the editor, I would retract the paper unless [the raw data] were produced posthaste, he says. Sir David Attenborough presents this landmark documentary which brings to life, in unprecedented detail, the lost world of the very last days of the dinosaurs. 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 . 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. Robert DePalma is a paleontologist who holds the lease to the Tanis site and controls access to it. [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. Both papers made their conclusions based on analysis of fish remains at the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota. Could it be a comet, asteroid, or meteor that crashed into the planet, and the reverberations ended the reign of the dinosaurs? DePalma and his colleagues have been working at Tanis since 2012. 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. "Robert has been meticulous, borderline archaeological in his excavation approach," says Manning, who has been working at Tanis from the beginning. Impact Theory of Mass Extinctions and the Invertebrate Fossil Record, The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary. 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. 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. As detailed by Science, the isotopic data in DePalmas paper was collected by archaeologist Curtis McKinney, who died in 2017. A field assistant, Rudy Pascucci, left, and the paleontologist Robert DePalma, right, at DePalma's dig site. 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. 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. It is certainly within the rights of the journal editors to request the source data, adds Mike Rossner, an independent scientist who investigates claims of biomedical image data manipulation. Robert DePalma. 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. A newly discovered winged raptor may have belonged to a lineage of dinosaurs that grew large after . In the caravan are microscopes . 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.. [citation needed], At the time of the Chicxulub impact, the present-day North American continent was still forming. The deposit may also provide some of the strongest evidence yet that nonbird dinosaurs were still thriving on impact day. 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. Today, the layer of debris, ash and soot resulting from the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth's sediment. This means that the skeletons located there are older than the asteroid that hit the earth, suggesting that some other event, like widespread volcanic eruptions or even climate change, did the dinosaurs in even before the asteroid appeared. Top editors give you the stories you want delivered right to your inbox each weekday. Some scientists say this destroyed the dinosaurs; others believe they thrived during the period. DePalma believed that the fossils found in Tanis, which sat on the KT layer, became collected there just after the asteroid struck the earth. 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. 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. If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that we cannot wait for a crisis to respond. While some lived near a river, lake, lagoon, or another place where sediment was found, many thrived in other habitats. The deathbed created within an hour of the impact has been excavated at an unprecedented fossil site in North Dakota. 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. She also removed DePalma as an author from her own manuscript, then under review at Nature. Could this provide evidence to the theory that an asteroid did indeed cause the mass extinction of the dinosaurs? What we do know is that during the Jurassic period, great global upheaval occurred with increases in temperature, surging sea levels, and less humidity. An imagined dinosaur scene just after the asteroid strike that caused a mass extinction, from . This explanation was proposed long before DePalma's discovery. Mr. Frithiof was able to broker an agreement between Paleo Prospectors and DePalma. [10][11] The impactor tore through the earth's crust, creating huge earthquakes, giant waves, and a crater 180 kilometers (112mi) wide, and blasted aloft trillions of tons of dust, debris, and climate-changing sulfates from the gypsum seabed, and it may have created firestorms worldwide. The latter paper was published by a team led by Robert DePalma, Durings former collaborator and a paleontologist now at the University of Manchester. Over the next 2 years, During says she made repeated attempts to discuss authorship with DePalma, but he declined to join her paper. While DePalma corrected his claim, his reputation still took a hit. An aspiring novelist, he attended The Ohio State University studying English and DePalma's dinosaur study, published in Scientific Reports in December 2021, . The Tanis site was first identified in 2008 and has been the focus of fieldwork by paleontologist Robert DePalma since . "I'm suspicious of the findings. Many theories exist about why the dinosaurs disappeared from the Earth. Paleontologist Robert DePalma believes he has found evidence of the first minutes to hours of that catastrophic event. All of these factors seemed strange and confused the paleontologists. Top left, a shocked mineral from Tanis. [15][1]:p.8. 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 most recent mass extinction event. It comprises two layers with sand and silt grading (coarse sands at the bottom, finer silt/clay particles at the top). 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. 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). More: Science Publisher Retracts 44 Papers for Being Utter Nonsense, We may earn a commission from links on this page. 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.