Additional fossils, including this beautifully preserved fish tail, have been found at the Tanis site in North Dakota. "It saddens me that folks are so quick to knock a study," he says. Raising the Bar: Chocolate's History, Art, and Taste With Sophia Contreras Rea What's potentially so special about this site? View Obituary & Service Information But just one dinosaur bone is discussed in the PNAS studyand it is mentioned in a supplement document rather than in the paper itself. In turn, the fish remains revealed the season their lives endedergo, the precise timing of the devastating asteroid strike to the Yucatn Peninsula. Tanis is on private land; DePalma holds the lease to the site and controls access to it. 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. There is considerable detail for times greater than hundreds of thousands of years either side of the event, and for certain kinds of change on either side of the K-Pg boundary layer. Could it be a comet, asteroid, or meteor that crashed into the planet, and the reverberations ended the reign of the dinosaurs? ", A North Dakota Excavation Had One Paleontologist Rethinking The Dinosaurs' Extinction, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This is not a case of he said, she said. This is also not a case of stealing someones ideas. 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. [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]. Robert DePalma. Until a few years ago, some researchers had suspected the last dinosaurs vanished thousands of years before the catastrophe. 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. Han vxte upp i Boca Raton i Florida. 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. The paleontologist believed that this new information further supported the theory that an asteroid . These powerful creatures prowled the Earth for about 165 million years before mysteriously disappearing (via U.S. Geological Survey). Artist's rendering of a large asteroid hitting Earth. (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.). Isaac Schultz. Tanis is a site of paleontological interest in southwestern North Dakota, United States. Of his discovery, DePalma said, "It's like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the . Dinosaurs have been dead for so long,'" DePalma told The Washington Post. During obtained extremely high-resolution x-ray images of the fossils at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France. The deposit itself is about 1.3m thick, sharply overlaying the point bar, in a drape-like manner. The co-authors included Walter Alvarez and Jan Smit, both renowned experts on the K-Pg impact and extinction. The Tanis site was first identified in 2008 and has been the focus of fieldwork by paleontologist Robert DePalma since . 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. "His line between commercial and academic work is not as clean as it is for other people," says one geologist who asked not to be named. 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. It needs to be explained. Also, there is little evidence on the detailed effects of the event on Earth and its biosphere. 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.. 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. Manning points out that all fossils described in the PNAS paper have been deposited in recognized collections and are available for other researchers to study. Robert DePalma. 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. The chief editor of Scientific Reports, Rafal Marszalek, says the journal is aware of concerns with the paper and is looking into them. DePalma gave the name Tanis to both the site and the river. Impact Theory of Mass Extinctions and the Invertebrate Fossil Record, The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary. She also removed DePalma as an author from her own manuscript, then under review at Nature. They did a few years of digging, uncovering beautiful, fragile sh . DePalma says his team also invited Durings team to join DePalmas ongoing study. When DePalmas paper was published just over 3 months later, During says she soon noticed irregularities in the figures, and she was concerned the authors had not published their raw data. [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. The CretaceousPaleogene ("K-Pg" or "K-T") extinction event around 66 million years ago wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs and many other species. Robert DePalma is a paleontologist who holds the lease to the Tanis site and controls access to it.. [8] The site continues to be explored. Gizmodo covered the research at the time. We may earn a commission from links on this page. 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. A study published by paleontologist Robert DePalma in December last year concluded that dinosaurs went extinct during the springtime. Additional fossils, including this beautifully preserved fish tail, have been found at the Tanis site in North Dakota. He later wrote a piece for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. There is still much unknown about these prehistoric animals. 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. [2], A paper documenting Tanis was released as a prepublication on 1 April 2019. 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. 2 / 4: Robert A. DePalma, a paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History and a graduate student at the University of Kansas. 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. As detailed by Science, the isotopic data in DePalmas paper was collected by archaeologist Curtis McKinney, who died in 2017. In the caravan are microscopes . This is misconduct, During wrote in an email to Gizmodo. When I saw [microtektites in their own impact craters], I knew this wasnt just any flood deposit. Bottom right, a small fragment of a marine annemite shell found in the freshwater Tanis deposit. . [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. 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. But McKinneys former department chair, Pablo Sacasa, says he is not aware of McKinney ever collaborating with laboratories at other institutions. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. Subscribe to News from Science for full access to breaking news and analysis on research and science policy. Robert A. DePalma, a paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History and a graduate student at the University of Kansas. I dont believe that Curtis himself went to another lab, he was ill for many years, Sacasa says. Despite more than 200 years of study, paleontologists have named only several hundred species. This dinosaur, a giant reptilian, lived during the Early Cretaceous period in oceans. The nerds travel to the final day of the dinosaurs reign with paleontologist Robert DePalma and the legendary Tanis Site. All rights reserved. "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. Robert James DePalma, 71, a longtime Florida resident passed away Tuesday, May 12, 2020 at his residence in Fort Myers, FL. DePalma holds the lease to the Tanis site, which sits on private land, and controls access to it. "I'm suspicious of the findings. The 1960 Valdivia Chile earthquake was the most powerful ever recorded, estimated at magnitude 9.4 to 9.6. Plus, tektites, pieces of natural glass formed by a meteor's impact, were scattered amid the soil. 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. "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. Robert DePalma made headlines again in 2021 with the discovery of a leg from a . He says the reviewers for the higher-profile journal made requests that were unreasonable for a paper that simply outlines the discovery and initial analysis of Tanis. Since 2012, paleontologist Robert DePalma has been excavating a site in North Dakota that he thinks is "an incredible and unprecedented discovery". Robert DePalma made headlines again in 2021 with the discovery of a leg from a Thescelosaurus dinosaur at Tanis, reported The Washington Post. 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. The formation is named for early studies at Hell Creek, located near Jordan, Montana, and it was designated as a National Natural Landmark in 1966. But relatively little fossil evidence is available from times nearer the crucial event, a difficulty known as the "Three metre problem". A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 378, Issue 6625.
