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. Discoveries shed new light on the day the dinosaurs died. 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. Robert DePalma r son till tandkirurgen Robert De Plama Sr i Delray Beach. And, if they are not forthcoming, there are numerous precedents for the retraction of scholarly articles on that basis alone.. September 20, 2021. The situation was first reported by the publication Science last month. 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. With Gizmodos Molly Taft | Techmodo. If I were the editor, I would retract the paper unless [the raw data] were produced posthaste, he says. 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. Such a conclusion might provide the best evidence yet that at least some dinosaurs were alive to witness the asteroid impact. He is survived by his loving wife,. 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. . He says his team came up with the idea of using fossils isotopic signals to hunt for evidence of the asteroid impacts season long ago, and During adopted it after learning about it during her Tanis visita notion During rejects. Tobin says the PNAS paper is densely packed with detail from paleontology, sedimentology, geochemistry, and more. 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. Still, when During submitted her manuscript to Nature on 22 June 2021, she listed DePalma as the studys second author. Robert DePalma, fdd 12 oktober 1981, r en amerikansk paleontolog och kurator . 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. Bob was born in Newark, NJ on December 26, 1948 to the late James and Rose DePalma. 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. "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. A bad day for dinosaurs was the subject of an engaging hour-and-a-half for both paleontologists and NASA researchers. 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. Science journalism's obligation to truth. Robert A. DePalma, a paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History and a graduate student at the University of Kansas. 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. This explanation was proposed long before DePalma's discovery. Plus, tektites, pieces of natural glass formed by a meteor's impact, were scattered amid the soil. A thin layer of bone cells on sturgeons fins thickens each spring and thins in the fall, providing a kind of seasonal metronome; the x-rays revealed these layers were just beginning to thicken when the animals met their end, pointing to a springtime impact. A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 378, Issue 6625. However, two independent scientists who reviewed the data behind the paper shortly after its publication say they were satisfied with its authenticity and have no reason to distrust it. DePalma and his group knew the creature could not have survived in North Dakota's fresh waters during the prehistoric age. Was it a fierce volcanic eruption that toppled these creatures? 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. DePalma's dinosaur study, published in Scientific Reports in December 2021, . [31][18], A BBC documentary on Tanis, titled Dinosaurs: The Final Day, with Sir David Attenborough, was broadcast on 15 April 2022. DePalma gave the name Tanis to both the site and the river. 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 . Robert DePalma made headlines again in 2021 with the discovery of a leg from a Thescelosaurus dinosaur at Tanis, reported The Washington Post. 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. Many theories exist about why the dinosaurs disappeared from the Earth. (Formula and details)The 2011 Thoku earthquake and tsunami was estimated at magnitude 9.1, so the energy released by the Chicxulub earthquakes, estimated at up to magnitude 11.5, may have been up to 101.5 x (11.59.1) = 3981 times larger. Dont yet have access? Tanis is a site of paleontological interest in southwestern North Dakota, United States. That same year, encouraged by a Dutch award for the thesis, she began to prepare a journal article. 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. [25] The last was published in December in Scientific Reports. The raw data are missing, he says, because the scientist who ran the analyses died years prior to the papers publication, and DePalma has been unable to recover them from his deceased collaborators laboratory. A study published by paleontologist Robert DePalma in December last year concluded that dinosaurs went extinct during the springtime. 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. Get more great content like this delivered right to you! 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. 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. In fact, there are probably dinosaur types that still remain unidentified, reported Smithsonian Magazine. The study of these creatures is limited to the fossils they left behind and those provide an incomplete picture. In turn, the fish remains revealed the season their lives endedergo, the precise timing of the devastating asteroid strike to the Yucatn Peninsula. UW News staff. [5] Co-author Professor Phillip Manning, a specialist in fossil soft tissues,[19] described DePalma's working techniques at Tanis as "meticulous" and "borderline archaeological in his excavation approach". American, said in a 2019 tweet that the findings from the site "have met with a good deal of skepticism from the paleontology community." . Kansas University, via Agence France-Presse Getty Images The Dakotaraptor fossil, next to a paleontologist for scale. 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. Ahlberg shared her concerns. 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Of his discovery, DePalma said, "It's like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the . "I hope this is all legitI'm just not 100% convinced yet," says Thomas Tobin, a geologist at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Appropriate editorial action will be taken once this matter is resolved.. Those files were almost certainly backed up, and the lab must have some kind of record keeping process that says what was done when and by whom., Barbi is similarly unimpressed. Special to The Forum. 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. His advisor suggested seeking a similar site, closer to the K-Pg boundary layer. 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. In June 2021, paleontologist Melanie During submitted a manuscript to Nature that she suspected might create a minor scientific sensation. It features what appear to be scanned printouts of manually typed tables containing the isotopic data from the fish fossils. Robert DEPALMA, Postgraduate Researcher | Cited by 253 | of The University of Manchester, Manchester | Read 18 publications | Contact Robert DEPALMA [13], The formation contains a series of fresh and brackish-water clays, mudstones, and sandstones deposited during the Maastrichtian and Danian (respectively, the end of the Cretaceous and the beginning of the Paleogene periods) by fluvial activity in fluctuating river channels and deltas and very occasional peaty swamp deposits along the low-lying eastern continental margin fronting the late Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway. The 2023 Complete Python Certification Bootcamp Bundle, What Is Carbon Capture? When asked for more information on the situation on January 3, a spokesperson for Scientific Reports said there were no updates. Please make a tax-deductible gift today. Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. [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. Its author, Douglas Preston, who learned of the find from DePalma in 2013, writes that DePalma's team found dinosaur bones caught up in the 1.3-meter-thick deposit, some so high in the sequence that DePalma suspects the carcasses were floating in the roiling water. Help News from Science publish trustworthy, high-impact stories about research and the people who shape it. 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If Tanis is all it is claimed to be, that debateand many others about this momentous day in Earth's historymay be over. 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. Raising the Bar: Chocolate's History, Art, and Taste With Sophia Contreras Rea Boca paleontologist Robert de Palma uncovers evidence of the day the dinosaurs diedand how it connects to homo sapiens. There is still much unknown about these prehistoric animals. DEPALMA Robert Michael DePalma Jr. of Columbus, Ohio passed away unexpectedly February 15, 2010 at the age of 26 years. The site was systematically excavated by Robert DePalma over several years beginning in 2012, working in near total secrecy. Using the same formula, the Chicxulub earthquakes may have released up to 1412 times as much energy as the Chile event. ^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. Point bars are common in mature or meandering streams. 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. Searching in the hills of North Dakota, palaeontologist Robert DePalma makes an incredible . Tanis is a rich fossil site that contains a bevy of marine creatures that apparently died in the immediate fallout of the asteroid impact, or the KT extinction. Other papers describing the site and its fossils are in progress. Tanis is a significant site because it appears to record the events from the first minutes until . He did so, and later also sent a partial paddlefish fossil he had excavated himself. By Dave Kindy. 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. Robert DePalma, a curator at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History, found some rare fossils close to Bowman, North Dakota, in 2013 that led to a hypothesis of his own. 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 . If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that we cannot wait for a crisis to respond. [15][1]:p.8. During the long process of discussing these options they decided to submit their paper, he says. In the caravan are microscopes . Tanis is a site of paleontological interest in southwestern North Dakota, United States. 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. 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 site, after all, does not conclusively prove that the asteroid's impact actually caused the dinosaurs' demise, reported Science. 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. 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. A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 378, Issue 6625. "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. This further evidences the violent nature of the event. 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. paper] may be fabricated, created to fit an already known conclusion. (She also posted the statement on the OSF Preprints server today.). Such waves are called seiches: The 2011 Tohoku earthquake near Japan triggered 1.5-meter-tall seiches in Norwegian fjords 8000 kilometers away. At his suggestion, she wrote a formal letter to Scientific Reports. 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. 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 . 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. The nerds travel to the final day of the dinosaurs reign with paleontologist Robert DePalma and the legendary Tanis Site. 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. 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. The papers chief finding was that the large asteroid that slammed into Earth at the end of the Cretaceous struck in spring, a conclusion reached by studying fossilized fish found in North Dakota. View Obituary & Service Information But two months before Durings paper would be published, a paper came out in Scientific Reports reaching essentially the same conclusion, based on an entirely separate data set, Science reported. "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. 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 last mass extinction event. Please make a tax-deductible gift today. [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]. 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. In December 2021, a team of paleontologists published data . 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. Robert DePalma is a paleontologist who holds the lease to the Tanis site and controls access to it. ", A North Dakota Excavation Had One Paleontologist Rethinking The Dinosaurs' Extinction, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The claim is the Tanis creatures were killed and entombed on the actual day a giant asteroid struck Earth. Last month, During published a comment on PubPeer alleging that the data in DePalmas paper may be fabricated. 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. Robert has been an Adjunct Professor in the Geosciences . Paleontologist Robert DePalma, featured in PBS's "Dinosaur Apocalypse," discusses an astonishing trove of fossils. 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. 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 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. . . [1]:p.8, Although Tanis and Chicxulub were connected by the remaining Interior Seaway, the massive water waves from the impact area were probably not responsible for the deposits at Tanis. 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). Artist's rendering of a large asteroid hitting Earth. It could be just one factor in a series of environmental events that led to their extinction. Does fossil site record dino-killing impact? It comprises two layers with sand and silt grading (coarse sands at the bottom, finer silt/clay particles at the top). After his excavations at the Tanis site in North Dakota unearthed a huge trove of fish fossils that were likely blasted by the asteroid impact . When one paleontologist began excavating a dig site in the mountains of North Dakota, he soon discovered new dinosaur evidence that may change history. But relatively little fossil evidence is available from times nearer the crucial event, a difficulty known as the "Three metre problem". Tanis is on private land; DePalma holds the lease to the site and controls access to it. [20] The sediment appeared to have liquefied and covered the deposited biota, then quickly solidified, preserving much of the contents in three dimensions. Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. More: Science Publisher Retracts 44 Papers for Being Utter Nonsense, We may earn a commission from links on this page. though Robert DePalma's love of the dead and buried was anything but . Robert A. DePalma1,2, David A. Burnham2,*, Larry D. Martin2,, Peter L. Larson 3 and Robert T. Bakker 4 1 Department of Vertebrate Paleontology, The Palm Beach Museum of Natural History, Fort Lauderdale, Florida; 2 University of Kansas Bio- Others later pointed out that the reconstructed skeleton includes a bone that really belonged to a turtle; DePalma and his colleagues issued a correction. All rights reserved. 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. Help News from Science publish trustworthy, high-impact stories about research and the people who shape it. Over the next 2 years, During says she made repeated attempts to discuss authorship with DePalma, but he declined to join her paper. 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. Dinosaurs continue to fascinate, even though they became extinct 65 million years ago. The fish contain isotope records and evidence of how the animals growth corresponded to the season (tree rings do the same thing). The x-rays revealed tiny bits of glass called spherulesremnants of the shower of molten rock that would have been thrown from the impact site and rained down around the world.