Some scientists question Robert DePalma's methods. The 1960 Valdivia Chile earthquake was the most powerful ever recorded, estimated at magnitude 9.4 to 9.6. [8] Following suspicions of manipulating data, a complained was lodged against DePalma with the University of Manchester. [1]:p.8192 The river flowed Eastward (other than impact driven waves),[1]:p.8192 with inland being to the West; Tanis itself was therefore in an ancient river valley close to the Westward shore of the Interior Seaway. A researcher claims that Robert DePalma published a faulty study in order to get ahead of her own work on the Tanis fossil site. Fossilized snapshot of mass death found on North Dakota ranch In fact, there are probably dinosaur types that still remain unidentified, reported Smithsonian Magazine. DePalma says his team also invited Durings team to join DePalmas ongoing study. Please make a tax-deductible gift today. Still, when During submitted her manuscript to Nature on 22 June 2021, she listed DePalma as the studys second author. 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. Over the next 2 years, During says she made repeated attempts to discuss authorship with DePalma, but he declined to join her paper. 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. Something is fishy here, says Mauricio Barbi, a high energy physicist at the University of Regina who specializes in applying physics methods to paleontology. 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. The Tanis site was first identified in 2008 and has been the focus of fieldwork by paleontologist Robert DePalma since . Today, the layer of debris, ash and soot resulting from the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth's sediment. 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. [26][27][28][29] A paper published in Scientific Reports in December 2021 suggested that the impact took place in the Spring or Early Summer, based on the cyclical isotope curves found in acipensieriform fish bones at the site, and other evidence. DePalma and his group knew the creature could not have survived in North Dakota's fresh waters during the prehistoric age. 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 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). 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. The deathbed created within an hour of the impact has been excavated at an unprecedented fossil site in North Dakota. 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. When asked for more information on the situation on January 3, a spokesperson for Scientific Reports said there were no updates. But others question DePalma's interpretations. The Final Day with David Attenborough (TV Movie 2022) - IMDb Tanis: Fossil found of dinosaur killed in asteroid strike - BBC But the fossils also held clues to the season of the catastrophe, During found. "The thing we can do is determine the likelihood that it died the day the meteor struck. 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. At the site, called Tanis, the researchers say they have discovered the chaotic debris left when tsunamilike waves surged up a river valley. [1]:pg.11 Key findings were presented in two conference papers in October 2017. During and DePalma spent 10 days in the field together, unearthing fossils of several paddlefish and species closely related to modern sturgeon called acipenseriformes. Fossil Site Reveals Day That Meteor Hit Earth and, Maybe, Wiped Out Many theories exist about why the dinosaurs disappeared from the Earth. Her mentor there, paleontologist Jan Smit, introduced her to DePalma, at the time a graduate student at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. Melanie During suspects Robert DePalma wanted to claim credit for identifying the dinosaur-killing asteroids season of impact and fabricated data in order to be able to publish a paper before she did. ", A North Dakota Excavation Had One Paleontologist Rethinking The Dinosaurs' Extinction, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Episode . However, because it is rare in any case for animals and plants to be fossilized, the fossil record leaves some major questions unanswered. Robert DEPALMA | Postgraduate Researcher | The University of Manchester Bottom left, micro-CT image showing cutaway of clay-altered ejecta spherule with internal core of unaltered impact glass. His advisor suggested seeking a similar site, closer to the K-Pg boundary layer. 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. . A study published by paleontologist Robert DePalma in December last year concluded that dinosaurs went extinct during the springtime. It reads: Editors Note: Readers are alerted that the reliability of data presented in this manuscript is currently in question. 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. Last modified on Fri 8 Apr 2022 11.20 EDT. The former Purdue President is now 76 years of age. The paper cleared peer review at PNAS within about 4 months. 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. View Obituary & Service Information The co-authors included Walter Alvarez and Jan Smit, both renowned experts on the K-Pg impact and extinction. But it's not at the asteroid's crash site. The site was systematically excavated by Robert DePalma over several years beginning in 2012, working in near total secrecy. 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. Paleontologist Robert DePalma Presents in NASA Goddard Colloquium on Based on the . "Capturing the event in that much detail is pretty remarkable," concedes Blair Schoene, a geologist at Princeton University, but he says the site does not definitively prove that the impact event was the exclusive trigger of the mass extinction. 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. 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. Paleontologist Robert DePalma, featured in PBS's "Dinosaur Apocalypse," discusses an astonishing trove of fossils. If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that we cannot wait for a crisis to respond. As a part of the settlement, the Sacklers will have immunity against any and all future civil litigation. But just one dinosaur bone is discussed in the PNAS studyand it is mentioned in a supplement document rather than in the paper itself. Robert James DePalma Obituary - Visitation & Funeral Information 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. 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. 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. 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 . 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. It is not even clear whether the massive waves were able to traverse the entire Interior Seaway. 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. It features what appear to be scanned printouts of manually typed tables containing the isotopic data from the fish fossils. 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. "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. PDF Paleontological Contributions - University Of Kansas [25] The last was published in December in Scientific Reports. ^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. A field assistant, Rudy Pascucci, left, and the paleontologist Robert DePalma, right, at DePalma's dig site. We may earn a commission from links on this page. Dont yet have access? Their team successfully removed fossil field jackets that contained articulated sturgeons, paddlefish, and bowfins. While DePalma corrected his claim, his reputation still took a hit. [1]:figure S29 pg.53 In 2022, a partial mummified Thescelosaurus was unearthed here with its skin still intact.[7]. Researchers Claim They've Found Fossilized Remains from - News This further evidences the violent nature of the event. The chief editor of Scientific Reports, Rafal Marszalek, says the journal is aware of concerns with the paper and is looking into them. Get more great content like this delivered right to you! 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. DePalma has not made public the raw, machine-produced data underlying his analyses. 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. . 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. 66 million-year-old deathbed linked to dinosaur-killing meteor He has mined a fossil site in North Dakota secretly for . 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. 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. Using the same formula, the Chicxulub earthquakes may have released up to 1412 times as much energy as the Chile event. Ritchie Hall | Earth, Energy & Environment Center 1414 Naismith Drive, Room 254 Lawrence, KS 66045 geology@ku.edu 785-864-4974 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. "I hope this is all legitI'm just not 100% convinced yet," says Thomas Tobin, a geologist at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. "It's not just for paleo nerds. During the long process of discussing these options they decided to submit their paper, he says. 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. Sir David Attenborough is to examine the mystery of the dinosaurs' last days in a BBC1/PBS/France Tlvisions feature film that will unearth a dig site hidden in the hills of North Dakota. That "disconnect" bothers Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. But there were other inconsistencies at the excavation site the fossils they found seemed out of place, with some skeletons located in vertical positions. This directly applies to today. [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. 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 . TV tonight: watch out dinosaurs, that big asteroid is coming - and so Published May 11, 2022 6:09PM (EDT) Fossilized snapshot of mass death found on North Dakota ranch 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]. 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. A North Dakota Excavation Had One Paleontologist Rethinking The Michael Price is associatenews editor for Science, primarily covering anthropology, archaeology, and human evolution. Could it be a comet, asteroid, or meteor that crashed into the planet, and the reverberations ended the reign of the dinosaurs? A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 378, Issue 6625. With Gizmodos Molly Taft | Techmodo. DePalma took over excavation rights on it several years ago from commercial fossil prospectors who discovered the site in 2008. Until a few years ago, some researchers had suspected the last dinosaurs vanished thousands of years before the catastrophe. At his suggestion, she wrote a formal letter to Scientific Reports. Tanis at the time was located on a river that may have drained into the shallow sea covering much of what is now the eastern and southern United States. In 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. They've been presented at meetings in various ways with various associated extraordinary claims," a West Coast paleontologist said to The New Yorker. Today, their fossils lie jumbled together at a site in North Dakota. North Dakota site shows wreckage from same object that killed the 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. "Robert has been meticulous, borderline archaeological in his excavation approach," says Manning, who has been working at Tanis from the beginning. Since 2013, Sackler has resided at a private property on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. 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. It can be divided into two layers, a bottom layer about 0.5m thick ("unit 1"), and a top layer about 0.8m thick (unit 2), capped by a 1 2cm layer of impactite tonstein that is indistinguishable from other dual layered KPg impact ejection materials found in Hells Creek, and finally a layer around 6cm thick of plant remains. Help News from Science publish trustworthy, high-impact stories about research and the people who shape it. Tanis is on private land; DePalma holds the lease to the site and controls access to it. Ive done quite a few excavations by now, and this was the most phenomenal site Ive ever worked on, During says. What we do know is that during the Jurassic period, great global upheaval occurred with increases in temperature, surging sea levels, and less humidity. Robert DEPALMA, Postgraduate Researcher | Cited by 253 | of The University of Manchester, Manchester | Read 18 publications | Contact Robert DEPALMA Both papers made their conclusions based on analysis of fish remains at the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota. 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. When I saw [microtektites in their own impact craters], I knew this wasnt just any flood deposit. In June 2021, paleontologist Melanie During submitted a manuscript to Nature that she suspected might create a minor scientific sensation. These powerful creatures prowled the Earth for about 165 million years before mysteriously disappearing (via U.S. Geological Survey). 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. A North Dakota Excavation Had One Paleontologist Rethinking The He has mined a fossil site in North Dakota secretly for years. How to interpret the new dinosaur fossil graveyard study - Quartz 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). The first documents a turtle fossil found at Tanis, killed by impalement by a tree branch, and found in the upper of two units of surge deposit, bracketed by ejecta. I dont believe that Curtis himself went to another lab, he was ill for many years, Sacasa says. Several independent scientists consulted about the case by Science agreed the Scientific Reports paper contains suspicious irregularities, and most were surprised that the paperwhich they note contains typos, unresolved proofreaders notes, and several basic notation errorswas published in the first place. DePalma, now a Ph.D. student at the University of Manchester, vehemently denies any wrongdoing. Others later pointed out that the reconstructed skeleton includes a bone that really belonged to a turtle; DePalma and his colleagues issued a correction. Does fossil site record dino-killing impact? 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 . (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.). By looking through this window into the past, we can apply these lessons to today. "That some competitors have cast Robert in a negative light is unfortunate and unfair," Richards told Science. Raw machine data are seldom supplied to end users (myself included) who contract for isotope analyses from a lab that does them., Cochran says DePalma erred in not including these data and their origins in his original manuscript, but the bottom line is that I have no reason to distrust the basic data or in any way believe that it was fabricated., Eiler disputes this.
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