Dinosaurs continue to fascinate, even though they became extinct 65 million years ago. During and DePalma spent 10 days in the field together, unearthing fossils of several paddlefish and species closely related to modern sturgeon called acipenseriformes. A bad day for dinosaurs was the subject of an engaging hour-and-a-half for both paleontologists and NASA researchers. 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. 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. Robert DePalma made headlines again in 2021 with the discovery of a leg from a . "After a while, we decided it wasn't a good route to go down," he says. "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. "The thing we can do is determine the likelihood that it died the day the meteor struck. Please make a tax-deductible gift today. Gizmodo covered the research at the time. [20] The sediment appeared to have liquefied and covered the deposited biota, then quickly solidified, preserving much of the contents in three dimensions. UW News staff. At the site, called Tanis, the researchers say they have discovered the chaotic debris left when tsunamilike waves surged up a river valley. DePalma characterizes their interactions differently. 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. They've been presented at meetings in various ways with various associated extraordinary claims," a West Coast paleontologist said to The New Yorker. 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. According to The New Yorker, DePalma also sports some off-putting paleontology practices, like keeping his discovery secret for so long and limiting other scientists' access to the site. As detailed by Science, the isotopic data in DePalmas paper was collected by archaeologist Curtis McKinney, who died in 2017. 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. 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. 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. 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. The former Purdue President is now 76 years of age. High-resolution x-rays revealed this paddlefish fossil from Tanis, a site in North Dakota, contained bits of glassy debris deposited shortly after the dinosaur-killing asteroid impact. 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. DEPALMA Robert Michael DePalma Jr. of Columbus, Ohio passed away unexpectedly February 15, 2010 at the age of 26 years. The findings are the work of paleontologist Robert DePalma, who has previously attracted controversy. "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. 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. Get more great content like this delivered right to you! 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.. 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.. Still, when During submitted her manuscript to Nature on 22 June 2021, she listed DePalma as the studys second author. We may earn a commission from links on this page. [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]. These fossils were delivered for research to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The claim is the Tanis creatures were killed and entombed on the actual day a giant asteroid struck Earth. By Dave Kindy. Mr. Frithiof was able to broker an agreement between Paleo Prospectors and DePalma. Both papers made their conclusions based on analysis of fish remains at the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota. Images: Top right, Robert DePalma and Peter Larson conduct field research in Tanis. Tobin says the PNAS paper is densely packed with detail from paleontology, sedimentology, geochemistry, and more. Searching in the hills of North Dakota, palaeontologist Robert DePalma makes an incredible . ^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. Tanis is a site of paleontological interest in southwestern North Dakota, United States. . Although they stopped short of saying the irregularities clearly point to fraud, mostbut not allsaid they are so concerning that DePalmas team must come up with the raw data behind its analyses if team members want to clear themselves. The skull of the scarred Edmontosaurus also showed signs of trauma, and from the size and shape of the marks on the bone, Rothschild and fellow co-author Robert DePalma, a paleontologist at the . Others defend DePalma, like his co-author, Mark Richards, a geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. Of his discovery, DePalma said, "It's like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the . Fragile remains spanning the layers of debris show that the site was laid down in a single event over a short timespan. [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. 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. DePalma and his colleagues have been working at Tanis since 2012. Cochran says the format of the isotopic data does not appear unusual. 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 . 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). An imagined dinosaur scene just after the asteroid strike that caused a mass extinction, from . Today, the layer of debris, ash and soot resulting from the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth's sediment. He suggested that the impact caused huge seiches (or tsunamis), which allowed the mosasaur tooth to travel from fresh water to that spot, along with freshwater sturgeon that may have choked on glassy pieces from the collision, reported Science. The fact that spherules were found in the fishes gills suggested the animals died in the minutes to hours after the impact. This directly applies to today. Episode #52: Your Mother Was a Vetulicolian and Your Father Smelt of Elderberries with Henry Gee . "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. 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 . "That's the first ever evidence of the interaction between life on the last day of the Cretaceous and the impact event," says team member Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. 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. A wealth of other evidence has persuaded most researchers that the impact played some role in the extinctions. [18], DePalma began excavating systematically in 2012[1]:11 and quickly found the site to contain very unusual and promising features. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. The day 66 million years ago when the reign of the dinosaurs ended and the rise of . Subscribe to News from Science for full access to breaking news and analysis on research and science policy. 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. Other papers describing the site and its fossils are in progress. They had breathed in early debris that fell into water, in the seconds or minutes before death. Credit. If not, well, fraud is on the table.. The co-authors included Walter Alvarez and Jan Smit, both renowned experts on the K-Pg impact and extinction. 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. 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. 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. To verify the study's claims, paleontologists say that DePalma must broaden access to the site and its material. Using the same formula, the Chicxulub earthquakes may have released up to 1412 times as much energy as the Chile event. 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. May 9, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT. Despite more than 200 years of study, paleontologists have named only several hundred species. 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. In June 2021, paleontologist Melanie During submitted a manuscript to Nature that she suspected might create a minor scientific sensation. "That some competitors have cast Robert in a negative light is unfortunate and unfair," Richards told Science. After trying to discuss the matter with editors at Scientific Reports for nearly a year, During recently decided to make her suspicions public. 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. A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 378, Issue 6625. 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. He did send Science a document containing what he says are McKinneys data. 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 . Please make a tax-deductible gift today. It features what appear to be scanned printouts of manually typed tables containing the isotopic data from the fish fossils. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. [1]:p.8 Seiche waves often occur shortly after significant earthquakes, even thousands of miles away, and can be sudden and violent. The site lacked the fine sediment layers he was initially looking for. Fossils from dinosaurs and other animals from thousands of years before the asteroid impact are very hard to come by, leading some to believe . That "disconnect" bothers Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. [22] The discovery received widespread media coverage from 29 March 2019. Could it be a comet, asteroid, or meteor that crashed into the planet, and the reverberations ended the reign of the dinosaurs? Recognizing the unique nature of the site, Nicklas and Sula brought in Robert DePalma, a University of Kansas graduate student, to perform additional excavations. A 2-centimeter-thick layer rich in telltale iridium caps the deposit. DePalma's dinosaur study, published in Scientific Reports in December 2021, . "I just hope this hasn't been oversensationalized.". "It's not just for paleo nerds. [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]. 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. 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 first two were conference papers presented in January of that year. 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. 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. Paleontologist Robert DePalma believes he has found evidence of the first minutes to hours of that catastrophic event. 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. 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. Its not clear where McKinney conducted these analyses, and raw data was not included in the published paper. [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. [5] The original discoverers of the site (Rob Sula and Steve Nicklas), who worked the site for several years, recognized its scientific importance and offered it to DePalma as he had some previous experience with working on fish sites. Help News from Science publish trustworthy, high-impact stories about research and the people who shape it. 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 response doesnt satisfy During and Ahlberg, who want the paper retracted. 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. The events at Tanis occurred far too soon after impact to be caused by the megatsunamis expected from any large impact near large bodies of water. The site, after all, does not conclusively prove that the asteroid's impact actually caused the dinosaurs' demise, reported Science. Robert DePalma. DePalma gave the name Tanis to both the site and the river. DePalma made major headlines in March 2019, when a splashy New Yorker story revealed the Tanis site to the world. 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. If the data were generated in a stable isotope lab, that lab had a desktop computer that recorded results, he says, and they should still be available. 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. According to Science, DePalma was incorrect in 2015 when he believed he discovered a bone from a new type of dinosaur. ", A North Dakota Excavation Had One Paleontologist Rethinking The Dinosaurs' Extinction, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Vid fyra rs lder fick han p ett museum . 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. . During and Ahlberg, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, question whether they exist. The fish contain isotope records and evidence of how the animals growth corresponded to the season (tree rings do the same thing). 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. 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. "I'm suspicious of the findings. Han var redan som barn fascinerad av ben. . FAU's Robert DePalma, senior author and an adjunct professor in the Department of Geosciences, Charles E. Schmidt College of Science, and a doctoral student at the . 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. [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. The site was systematically excavated by Robert DePalma over several years beginning in 2012, working in near total secrecy. September 20, 2021. 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. 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. The email, which came after Science started to inquire about the case, says their concerns remain under investigation. The nerds travel to the final day of the dinosaurs reign with paleontologist Robert DePalma and the legendary Tanis Site. Even as a child, DePalma wondered what the Cretaceous was like. 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. 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. For the archaeological site in Egypt, see, PNAS paper published in 2019: Prepublication and authorship, Last edited on 25 February 2023, at 16:30, CretaceousPaleogene ("K-Pg" or "K-T") extinction event, "A seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the KPg boundary, North Dakota", Life after impact: A remarkable mammal burrow from the Chicxulub aftermath in the Hell Creek Formation, North Dakota, Tanis, a mixed marine-continental event deposit at the KPG Boundary in North Dakota caused by a seiche triggered by seismic waves of the Chicxulub Impact, "A Blast from the Past: Geochemical Identity of the Chicxulub Bolide and Immediate Effects of the Impact, recorded at Tanis, North Dakota", "Tanis: Fossil of dinosaur killed in asteroid strike found, scientists claim", "International Consensus Link Between Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction Is Rock Solid", "The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary", "National Natural Landmarks National Natural Landmarks (U.S. National Park Service)", "Fossil site is first ever to show deaths from mass extinction asteroid impact", "Paleontologist accused of faking data in dino-killing asteroid paper", "Stunning discovery offers glimpse of minutes following 'dinosaur-killer' Chicxulub impact", "Google News search 'Robert DePalma fossil' before 2019-03-28", "Incredible fossil find may be first victims of dino-killer asteroid", "Google News search 'Robert DePalma fossil' 27-03 to 2903 2019", Robert DePalma voice interview with Jason Spiess on the 'Crude Life Content Network' channel, "Robert DEPALMA | Postgraduate Researcher | the University of Manchester, Manchester | Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences", "Impaled turtle reveals new insight on the day the dinosaurs died", "A Turtle from the Tanis KPG Mass-Death Assemblage: Further Evidence for Circum-Riparian Disruption by a Massive Chicxulub Impact-Triggered Surge", "Seasonal calibration of the end-cretaceous Chicxulub impact event", "The Mesozoic terminated in boreal spring", A seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the KPg boundary, North Dakota (2019), Supporting material and analysis for above paper (2019), https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tanis_(fossil_site)&oldid=1141547888, animals and plant material preserved in three-dimensional detail and at times upright, rather than pressed flat as usual, their remains thrown together by the massive wave movements, millions of "near perfect" primary (that is, not, large primitive feathers 3040cm long with 3.5mm quills, broken remains from almost all known Hell Creek dinosaur groups, fossils of hatchlings and intact eggs with embryo fossils, "the fluctuating, reticulated terminal-Cretaceous shoreline was not far away from the Tanis region", "The Event Deposit is a 1.3-m-thick bed that shows an overall grading upward from coarse sand to fine silt/clay and is associated with a deeply incised, large meandering river [and] sharply overlies the aggrading surface of a point bar", "the point bar exhibits 10.5 m of isochronous elevation change along its inclined surface and its width extends <50 m perpendicular to (ancient) flow direction. 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.