Douglas Preston's writing about the discovery lauds it as one of the . . The mud and sand are dotted with glassy spherulesmany caught in the gills of the fishisotopically dated to 65.8 million years ago. PDF Paleontological Contributions - University Of Kansas DePalma also acknowledged that the manual transcription process resulted in some regrettable instances in which data points drifted from the correct values, but none of these examples changed the overall geometry of the plotted lines or affected their interpretation. McKinneys non-digital data set, he says, is viable for research work and remains within normal tolerances for usage.. The 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. Science asked other co-authors on the paper, including Manning, for comment, but none responded. Robert DePalma Obituary (2010) - Columbus, OH - The Columbus Dispatch New Winged Dinosaur May Have Used Its Feathers to Pin Down Prey Robert DePalma published a study in December 2021 that said the dinosaurs went extinct in the springtime - but a former colleague has alleged that it's based on fake data. The Day the Dinosaurs Died | The New Yorker Bob was born in Newark, NJ on December 26, 1948 to the late James and Rose DePalma. 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. .mw-parser-output .citation{word-wrap:break-word}.mw-parser-output .citation:target{background-color:rgba(0,127,255,0.133)}^Note 1 This section is drawn from the original 2019 paper[1] and its supplementary materials,[4] which describe the site in detail. By Dave Kindy. . "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. 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. 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Could this provide evidence to the theory that an asteroid did indeed cause the mass extinction of the dinosaurs? If I were the editor, I would retract the paper unless [the raw data] were produced posthaste, he says. [31][18], A BBC documentary on Tanis, titled Dinosaurs: The Final Day, with Sir David Attenborough, was broadcast on 15 April 2022. 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. [8] Following suspicions of manipulating data, a complained was lodged against DePalma with the University of Manchester. Also, there is little evidence on the detailed effects of the event on Earth and its biosphere. Could it be a comet, asteroid, or meteor that crashed into the planet, and the reverberations ended the reign of the dinosaurs? 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. "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. 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. Artist's rendering of a large asteroid hitting Earth. [15][1]:p.8. 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. 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 . Top left, a shocked mineral from Tanis. A North Dakota Excavation Had One Paleontologist Rethinking The (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.). Paleontologist accused of faking data in dino-killing asteroid paper. In June 2021, paleontologist Melanie During submitted a manuscript to Nature that she suspected might create a minor scientific sensation. How we reported a controversial story about the day the dinosaurs died When I saw [microtektites in their own impact craters], I knew this wasnt just any flood deposit. Fossilized snapshot of mass death found on North Dakota ranch DePalma, now a Ph.D. student at the University of Manchester, vehemently denies any wrongdoing. [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]. The event included waves with at least 10 meters run-up height (the vertical distance a wave travels after it reaches land). [8] The site continues to be explored. Paleontologist Robert DePalma, featured in PBS's "Dinosaur Apocalypse," discusses an astonishing trove of fossils. After The New Yorker published "The Day the Dinosaurs Died," which details the discovery of a fossil site in Hell's Creek, North Dakota, by Robert DePalma a Kansas State PhD student and paleontologist, debates and discussions across the country arose over the article. He did so, and later also sent a partial paddlefish fossil he had excavated himself. Eiler agrees. A A. Paleontologist Robert DePalma has done it again. The day 66 million years ago when the reign of the dinosaurs ended and the rise of . Get more great content like this delivered right to you! Seasonal calibration of the end-cretaceous Chicxulub impact event - Nature 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. No fossil beds were yet known that could clearly show the details that might resolve these questions. Tanis (fossil site) If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that we cannot wait for a crisis to respond. 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. The Boca Interview: Making Prehistory with Robert de Palma Robert DePalma uncovers a preserved articulated body of a 65-million-year-old fish at Tanis. Shards of Asteroid That Killed the Dinosaurs May Have Been Found in By looking through this window into the past, we can apply these lessons to today. But it's not at the asteroid's crash site. More: Science Publisher Retracts 44 Papers for Being Utter Nonsense, We may earn a commission from links on this page. Hell Creek evidence pinpoints month of dinosaur extinction - Earth & Sky Robert Depalma, paleontologist, describes the meteor impact 66 million years ago that generated a tsunami-like wave in an inland sea that killed and buried f. Her mentor there, paleontologist Jan Smit, introduced her to DePalma, at the time a graduate student at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. 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. Ritchie Hall | Earth, Energy & Environment Center 1414 Naismith Drive, Room 254 Lawrence, KS 66045 geology@ku.edu 785-864-4974 Subscribe to News from Science for full access to breaking news and analysis on research and science policy. Another question about dinosaurs is what caused their extinction and there are many theories about that, too. 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). Ultimately, both studies, which appeared in print within weeks of each other, were complementary and mutually reinforcing, he says. Robert DePalma. 'The day the dinosaurs died': Fossilized snapshot of mass death found 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 . But not everyone has fully embraced the find, perhaps in part because it was first announced to the world last week in an article in The New Yorker. A newly discovered winged raptor may have belonged to a lineage of dinosaurs that grew large after . We werent just near the KT boundary. The three-metre problem encompasses that . Page numbers in this section refer to those papers. The iridium-enriched CretaceousPaleogene boundary, which separates the Cretaceous from the Cenozoic, is distinctly visible as a discontinuous thin marker above and occasionally within the formation. Such waves are called seiches: The 2011 Tohoku earthquake near Japan triggered 1.5-meter-tall seiches in Norwegian fjords 8000 kilometers away. A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 378, Issue 6625. Dont yet have access? The deposit may also provide some of the strongest evidence yet that nonbird dinosaurs were still thriving on impact day. Additional fossils, including this beautifully preserved fish tail, have been found at the Tanis site in North Dakota. The 1960 Valdivia Chile earthquake was the most powerful ever recorded, estimated at magnitude 9.4 to 9.6. Help News from Science publish trustworthy, high-impact stories about research and the people who shape it. "I just hope this hasn't been oversensationalized.". Cochran says the format of the isotopic data does not appear unusual. Robert DePalma (kottke.org) A bad day for dinosaurs was the subject of an engaging hour-and-a-half for both paleontologists and NASA researchers. 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 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. Could NASA's Electric Airplane Make Aviation More Sustainable? THE DAY THE CRETACEOUS ENDED - Magzter One Of Richest Fossil Resources In The World Crossed By Keystone - SDPB The Tanis site was first identified in 2008 and has been the focus of fieldwork by paleontologist Robert DePalma since . Appropriate editorial action will be taken once this matter is resolved.. "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. Paleontologist accused of faking data in dino-killing asteroid paper By 2013, he was still studying the site, which he named "Tanis" after the ancient Egyptian city of the same name,[5] and had told only three close colleagues about it. Dinosaurs' Last Spring: Groundbreaking Study Pinpoints Timing of 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. At his suggestion, she wrote a formal letter to Scientific Reports. 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.. Fossils from dinosaurs and other animals from thousands of years before the asteroid impact are very hard to come by, leading some to believe . Does fossil site record dino-killing impact? The deposit itself is about 1.3m thick, sharply overlaying the point bar, in a drape-like manner. New Evidence Shows Experts Have Dinosaurs' Extinction All Wrong Their team successfully removed fossil field jackets that contained articulated sturgeons, paddlefish, and bowfins. If not, well, fraud is on the table.. Why this stunning dinosaur fossil discovery has scientists stomping mad He had already named the genus Dakotaraptor when others identified it as belonging to a prehistoric turtle. Even as a child, DePalma wondered what the Cretaceous was like. ", "Tanis exhibits a depositional scenario that was unusual in being highly conducive to exceptional (largely three dimensional) preservation of many articulated carcasses (Konservat-Lagersttte). 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. As detailed by Science, the isotopic data in DePalmas paper was collected by archaeologist Curtis McKinney, who died in 2017. Robert DePalma, fdd 12 oktober 1981, r en amerikansk paleontolog och kurator . In lieu of controversial New Yorker article, UCD Professor weighs in on [1]:p.8193 The original paper describes the river in technical detail:[1]:Fig.1 and p.9181-8193. New Evidence May Shed Light on Extinction Event That Killed the - MSN All rights reserved. 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. Perhaps no animal, living or dead, has captivated the world in the way that dinosaurs have. As the drama unfolded, paleontologist Robert DePalma got a lot of personal and professional criticisms, including suggestions that he was showboating and driving up controversy to get additional . The claim is the Tanis creatures were killed and entombed on the actual day a giant asteroid struck Earth. 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. In the BBC documentary, Robert DePalma, a relative of film director Brian De Palma, can be seen sporting an Indiana Jones-style fedora and tan shirt. Isaac Schultz. 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. Get more great content like this delivered right to you! 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. During described the findings in her 2018 masters thesis, a copy of which she shared with DePalma in February 2019. 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. And, if they are not forthcoming, there are numerous precedents for the retraction of scholarly articles on that basis alone.. "Outcrops like [this] are the reasons many of us are drawn to geology," says David Kring, a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, who wasn't a member of the research team. However, because it is rare in any case for animals and plants to be fossilized, the fossil record leaves some major questions unanswered. Some scientists say this destroyed the dinosaurs; others believe they thrived during the period. With Gizmodos Molly Taft | Techmodo. Ahlberg shared her concerns. Others later pointed out that the reconstructed skeleton includes a bone that really belonged to a turtle; DePalma and his colleagues issued a correction. Robert DePalma Frederich Cichocki Manuel Dierick Robert Feeney: JPS.C.10.0001: Volume 1, 2007 "How to Make a Fossil: Part 2 - Dinosaur Mummies and Other Soft Tissue" . Its not clear where McKinney conducted these analyses, and raw data was not included in the published paper. 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. How to interpret the new dinosaur fossil graveyard study - Quartz 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. Paleontologist accused of faking data in dino-killing asteroid paper Using the same formula, the Chicxulub earthquakes may have released up to 1412 times as much energy as the Chile event. He reportedly helps fund his fieldwork by selling replicas of his finds to private collectors. How to Know If the Heat Is Making You Sick. TV Paleontologist Facing Backlash After Reportedly Faking 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. 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 . December 10, 2021 Source: . Robert DePalma | KU Geology - University Of Kansas Despite more than 200 years of study, paleontologists have named only several hundred species. Miami Dade does not have an operational mass spectrometer, suggesting McKinney would have had to perform the isotope analyses underlying the paper at another facility. 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. The fact that spherules were found in the fishes gills suggested the animals died in the minutes to hours after the impact. 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 has mined a fossil site in North Dakota secretly for . Such Konservat-Lagersttten are rare because they require special depositional circumstances. Melanie During, a paleontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, submitted a paper for publication in the journal Nature in June 2021. [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. Fragment of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs may have been