When I saw [microtektites in their own impact craters], I knew this wasnt just any flood deposit. Robert DePalma is a paleontologist who holds the lease to the Tanis site and controls access to it. 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. When one paleontologist began excavating a dig site in the mountains of North Dakota, he soon discovered new dinosaur evidence that may change history. Science asked other co-authors on the paper, including Manning, for comment, but none responded. 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. DePalma's dinosaur study, published in Scientific Reports in December 2021, . In December 2021, a team of paleontologists published data . [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. "Robert has been meticulous, borderline archaeological in his excavation approach," says Manning, who has been working at Tanis from the beginning. 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. If I were the editor, I would retract the paper unless [the raw data] were produced posthaste, he says. With this deposit, we can chart what happened the day the Cretaceous died. 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. Using the same formula, the Chicxulub earthquakes may have released up to 1412 times as much energy as the Chile event. 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. DePalma submitted his own paper to Scientific Reports in late August 2021, with an entirely different team of authors, including his Ph.D. supervisor at the University of Manchester, Phillip Manning. While some lived near a river, lake, lagoon, or another place where sediment was found, many thrived in other habitats. 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. Fish were swept up in mud and sand in the aftermath of a great wave sparked by the Chicxulub impact, paleontologists say. 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. 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. 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 seiche waves exposed and covered the site twice, as millions of tiny microtektite droplets and debris from the impact were arriving on ballistic trajectories from their source in what is now the Yucatn Peninsula. "It saddens me that folks are so quick to knock a study," he says. Such waves are called seiches: The 2011 Tohoku earthquake near Japan triggered 1.5-meter-tall seiches in Norwegian fjords 8000 kilometers away. "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. 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. 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" . 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 . Subscribe to News from Science for full access to breaking news and analysis on research and science policy. During and DePalma spent 10 days in the field together, unearthing fossils of several paddlefish and species closely related to modern sturgeon called acipenseriformes. 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. Episode . . Robert A. DePalma, a paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History and a graduate student at the University of Kansas. One of these is whether dinosaurs were already declining at the time of the event due to ongoing volcanic climate change. Bottom right, a small fragment of a marine annemite shell found in the freshwater Tanis deposit. 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. Since 2013, Sackler has resided at a private property on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. If they can provide the raw data, its just a sloppy paper. 2 / 4: Robert A. DePalma, a paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History and a graduate student at the University of Kansas. 03/30/2022. 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). A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 378, Issue 6625. [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. Raising the Bar: Chocolate's History, Art, and Taste With Sophia Contreras Rea Taylor Mickal/NASA. Please make a tax-deductible gift today. The findings are the work of paleontologist Robert DePalma, who has previously attracted controversy. 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. According to Science, DePalma was incorrect in 2015 when he believed he discovered a bone from a new type of dinosaur. 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. 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. [20], Later discoveries included large primitive feathers 3040cm long with 3.5mm quills believed to come from large dinosaurs; broken remains from almost all known Hell Creek dinosaur groups, including some incredibly rare hatchling and intact egg with embryo fossils; fossil pterosaurs for which no other fossils exist at that time; drowned ant nests with ants inside and chambers filled with asteroid debris; and burrows of small mammals living at the site immediately after the impact. The co-authors included Walter Alvarez and Jan Smit, both renowned experts on the K-Pg impact and extinction. 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. 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 . The Byte reports that the amber was found 2,000 miles away from the asteroid crater off the coast of Mexico believed to be . [8] Following suspicions of manipulating data, a complained was lodged against DePalma with the University of Manchester. 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. 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. 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 Hell Creek Formation was at this time very low-lying or partly submerged land at the northern end of the seaway, and the Chicxulub impact occurred in the shallow seas at the southern end, approximately 3,050km (1,900mi) from the site. DePalma made major headlines in March 2019, when a splashy New Yorker story revealed the Tanis site to the world. Cochran says the format of the isotopic data does not appear unusual. This is misconduct, During wrote in an email to Gizmodo. DePalma's team says the killing is captured in forensic detail in the 1.3-meter-thick Tanis deposit, which it says formed in just a few hours, beginning perhaps 13 minutes after impact. Jan Smit first presented a paper describing the Tanis site, its association with the K-Pg boundary event and associated fossil discoveries, including the presence of glass spherules from the Chicxulub impact clustered in the gill rakers of acipenciform fishes and also found in amber. DePalma and his colleagues have been working at Tanis since 2012. 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. [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. During the long process of discussing these options they decided to submit their paper, he says. The chief editor of Scientific Reports, Rafal Marszalek, says the journal is aware of concerns with the paper and is looking into them. It's at a North Dakota cattle ranch, some 2,000 miles (3,220 km) away. But others question DePalma's interpretations. By looking through this window into the past, we can apply these lessons to today. In my view, it was an intentional omission which leads me to question the credibility of data. Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, says, There is a simple way for the DePalma team to address these concerns, and that is to publish the raw data output from their stable isotope analyses.. Additional fossils, including this beautifully preserved fish tail, have been found at the Tanis site in North Dakota. At the site, called Tanis, the researchers say they have discovered the chaotic debris left when tsunamilike waves surged up a river valley. [25] The last was published in December in Scientific Reports. DePalma gave the name Tanis to both the site and the river. [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. Melanie During, a paleontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, submitted a paper for publication in the journal Nature in June 2021. [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. [1]:p.8 Seiche waves often occur shortly after significant earthquakes, even thousands of miles away, and can be sudden and violent. In December 2021, a team of paleontologists published data . 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. 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. 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. "I'm suspicious of the findings. Get more great content like this delivered right to you! To verify the study's claims, paleontologists say that DePalma must broaden access to the site and its material. The Dakotaraptor fossil, next to a paleontologist for scale. The paleontologist believed that this new information further supported the theory that an asteroid . Something is fishy here, says Mauricio Barbi, a high energy physicist at the University of Regina who specializes in applying physics methods to paleontology. 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. 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Credit. "I just hope this hasn't been oversensationalized.". Han vxte upp i Boca Raton i Florida. Images: Top right, Robert DePalma and Peter Larson conduct field research in Tanis. 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.. In fact, there are probably dinosaur types that still remain unidentified, reported Smithsonian Magazine. 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. There was no advanced decay. The paleontologist Robert DePalma excavating a tangle of plant and animal fossils at the Tanis site in North Dakota. [5] Analysis of early samples showed that the microtektites at Tanis were almost identical to those found at the Mexican impact site, and were likely to be primary deposits (directly from the impact) and not reworked (moved from their original location by later geological processes).[1]. [1]:figure S29 pg.53 In 2022, a partial mummified Thescelosaurus was unearthed here with its skin still intact.[7]. 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. The claim is the Tanis creatures were killed and entombed on the actual day a giant asteroid struck Earth. A study published by paleontologist Robert DePalma in December last year concluded that dinosaurs went extinct during the springtime. Kansas University, via Agence France-Presse Getty Images 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. [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. ", "Tanis exhibits a depositional scenario that was unusual in being highly conducive to exceptional (largely three dimensional) preservation of many articulated carcasses (Konservat-Lagersttte). DePalma says his team also invited Durings team to join DePalmas ongoing study. The University of Kansas prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, national origin, age, ancestry, disability, status as a veteran, sexual orientation, marital status, parental status, gender identity, gender expression, and genetic information in the university's programs and activities. 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. Searching in the hills of North Dakota, palaeontologist Robert DePalma makes an incredible . The nerds travel to the final day of the dinosaurs reign with paleontologist Robert DePalma and the legendary Tanis Site. But a former colleague, Melanie During at Uppsala University, asserts that DePalma created data to support the conclusion. Some scientists question Robert DePalma's methods. 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. A researcher claims that Robert DePalma published a faulty study in order to get ahead of her own work on the Tanis fossil site. 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. Both papers studied 66-million-year-old paddlefish jawbones and sturgeon fin spines from Tanis. [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. 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. 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. Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. Help News from Science publish trustworthy, high-impact stories about research and the people who shape it. 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. 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. Robert DePalma is a paleontologist who holds the lease to the Tanis site and controls access to it.. 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. Numerous famous fossils of plants and animals, including many types of dinosaur fossils, have been discovered there. DePalma has not made public the raw, machine-produced data underlying his analyses. And, if they are not forthcoming, there are numerous precedents for the retraction of scholarly articles on that basis alone.. 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. They did a few years of digging, uncovering beautiful, fragile sh . Comes with twelve different courses comprised of a huge number of lessons, and each one will help you learn more about Python itself, and can be accessed when you want and as often as you want forever, making it ideal for learning a new skill. Despite more than 200 years of study, paleontologists have named only several hundred species. A newly discovered winged raptor may have belonged to a lineage of dinosaurs that grew large after . 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. Sackler has three children Rebecca, Marianna, and David with his now ex-wife, Beth Sackler. "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. [citation needed], At the time of the Chicxulub impact, the present-day North American continent was still forming. Vid fyra rs lder fick han p ett museum . Asked where McKinney conducted his isotopic analyses, DePalma did not provide an answer. 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. The event included waves with at least 10 meters run-up height (the vertical distance a wave travels after it reaches land). These dimensions are in the upper size range for point bars in the Hell Creek Formation and compare favorably with modern rivers with large channels that are tens to hundreds of meters wide", "[The Event flood deposits are] indicative of a westward or inland flow direction that is opposite of the natural (ancient) current of the Tanis River", "[The] Event Deposit is restricted to (an ancient) river valley and is conspicuously absent from the adjacent floodplains. But During, a Ph.D. candidate at Uppsala University (UU), received a shock of her own in December 2021, while her paper was still under review.