The former Purdue President is now 76 years of age. "Robert has been meticulous, borderline archaeological in his excavation approach," says Manning, who has been working at Tanis from the beginning. A A. Paleontologist Robert DePalma has done it again. Gizmodo covered the research at the time. That same year, encouraged by a Dutch award for the thesis, she began to prepare a journal article. Fossils from dinosaurs and other animals from thousands of years before the asteroid impact are very hard to come by, leading some to believe . Kansas University, via Agence France-Presse Getty Images During and Ahlberg, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, question whether they exist. Subscribe to News from Science for full access to breaking news and analysis on research and science policy. [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. Drawing on research from paleontologist Robert DePalma, we follow DePalma's dig over the course of three years at a new site in North Dakota, unearthing remarkably well-preserved fossilised . If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that we cannot wait for a crisis to respond. "I just hope this hasn't been oversensationalized.". The study of these creatures is limited to the fossils they left behind and those provide an incomplete picture. But a former colleague, Melanie During at Uppsala University, asserts that DePalma created data to support the conclusion. When I saw [microtektites in their own impact craters], I knew this wasnt just any flood deposit. We werent just near the KT boundary. 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. DePalma believed that the fossils found in Tanis, which sat on the KT layer, became collected there just after the asteroid struck the earth. Numerous famous fossils of plants and animals, including many types of dinosaur fossils, have been discovered there. She also removed DePalma as an author from her own manuscript, then under review at Nature. 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. It needs to be explained. The CretaceousPaleogene ("K-Pg" or "K-T") extinction event around 66 million years ago wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs and many other species. 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. Their team successfully removed fossil field jackets that contained articulated sturgeons, paddlefish, and bowfins. A field assistant, Rudy Pascucci, left, and the paleontologist Robert DePalma, right, at DePalma's dig site. Credit. It's at a North Dakota cattle ranch, some 2,000 miles (3,220 km) away. 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. Eiler agrees. By Nicole Karlis Senior Writer. Something is fishy here, says Mauricio Barbi, a high energy physicist at the University of Regina who specializes in applying physics methods to paleontology. Tobin says the PNAS paper is densely packed with detail from paleontology, sedimentology, geochemistry, and more. In December 2021, DePalma and his colleagues published an important paper . Retaliation is also prohibited by university policy. Recognizing the unique nature of the site, Nicklas and Sula brought in Robert DePalma, a University of Kansas graduate student, to perform additional excavations. [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. "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. They did a few years of digging, uncovering beautiful, fragile sh . 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. The claim is the Tanis creatures were killed and entombed on the actual day a giant asteroid struck Earth. 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. An aspiring novelist, he attended The Ohio State University studying English and During obtained extremely high-resolution x-ray images of the fossils at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France. Mr. Frithiof was able to broker an agreement between Paleo Prospectors and DePalma. 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. 03/30/2022. A researcher claims that Robert DePalma published a faulty study in order to get ahead of her own work on the Tanis fossil site. The first two were conference papers presented in January of that year. We may earn a commission from links on this page. May 9, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT. 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). Today, the layer of debris, ash and soot resulting from the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth's sediment. In June 2021, paleontologist Melanie During submitted a . His reputation suffered when, in 2015, he and his colleagues described a new genus of dinosaur named Dakotaraptor, found in a site close to Tanis. 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. [1]:p.8193 The original paper describes the river in technical detail:[1]:Fig.1 and p.9181-8193. 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. Tanis is a site of paleontological interest in southwestern North Dakota, United States. As detailed by Science, the isotopic data in DePalmas paper was collected by archaeologist Curtis McKinney, who died in 2017. November 5, 2015. Robert DEPALMA, Postgraduate Researcher | Cited by 253 | of The University of Manchester, Manchester | Read 18 publications | Contact Robert DEPALMA He did send Science a document containing what he says are McKinneys data. Its not clear where McKinney conducted these analyses, and raw data was not included in the published paper. Forum News Service, provided 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. If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that we cannot wait for a crisis to respond. 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. Several more papers on Tanis are now in preparation, Manning says, and he expects they will describe the dinosaur fossils that are mentioned in The New Yorker article. Manning confirms rumors that the study was initially submitted to a journal with a higher impact factor before it was accepted at PNAS. "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. Paleontologist Robert DePalma believes he has found evidence of the first minutes to hours of that catastrophic event. As a part of the settlement, the Sacklers will have immunity against any and all future civil litigation. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. Even as a child, DePalma wondered what the Cretaceous was like. 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Robert James DePalma, 71, a longtime Florida resident passed away Tuesday, May 12, 2020 at his residence in Fort Myers, FL. 2 / 4: Robert A. DePalma, a paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History and a graduate student at the University of Kansas. That "disconnect" bothers Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. The deathbed created within an hour of the impact has been excavated at an unprecedented fossil site in North Dakota. 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. A wealth of other evidence has persuaded most researchers that the impact played some role in the extinctions. 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. DePalma did not respond to an email request for an interview. His advisor suggested seeking a similar site, closer to the K-Pg boundary layer. Some scientists question Robert DePalma's methods. 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. 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. Until a few years ago, some researchers had suspected the last dinosaurs vanished thousands of years before the catastrophe. The exceptional nature of the findings and conclusions have led some scientists to await further scrutiny by the scientific community before agreeing that the discoveries at Tanis have been correctly understood. 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. 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. Robert DePalma made headlines again in 2021 with the discovery of a leg from a Thescelosaurus dinosaur at Tanis, reported The Washington Post. When asked for more information on the situation on January 3, a spokesperson for Scientific Reports said there were no updates. ", "Tanis exhibits a depositional scenario that was unusual in being highly conducive to exceptional (largely three dimensional) preservation of many articulated carcasses (Konservat-Lagersttte). 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). 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. Bde hans far och hans farfars bror var kirurger i Florida. A 2-centimeter-thick layer rich in telltale iridium caps the deposit. Eighteen months before publication of the peer-reviewed PNAS paper in 2019[1] DePalma and his colleagues presented two conference papers on fossil finds at Tanis on 23 October 2017 at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. 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. He did so, and later also sent a partial paddlefish fossil he had excavated himself. Impact Theory of Mass Extinctions and the Invertebrate Fossil Record, The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary. [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. 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. Bob was born in Newark, NJ on December 26, 1948 to the late James and Rose DePalma. 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. 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. Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. It is not even clear whether the massive waves were able to traverse the entire Interior Seaway. 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. This dinosaur, a giant reptilian, lived during the Early Cretaceous period in oceans. 01/05/2021. DePalma made major headlines in March 2019, when a splashy New Yorker story revealed the Tanis site to the world. Vid fyra rs lder fick han p ett museum . 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. Since 2012, paleontologist Robert DePalma has been excavating a site in North Dakota that he thinks is "an incredible and unprecedented discovery". This directly applies to today. 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. But McKinneys former department chair, Pablo Sacasa, says he is not aware of McKinney ever collaborating with laboratories at other institutions. Ritchie Hall | Earth, Energy & Environment Center 1414 Naismith Drive, Room 254 Lawrence, KS 66045 geology@ku.edu 785-864-4974 But just one dinosaur bone is discussed in the PNAS studyand it is mentioned in a supplement document rather than in the paper itself. 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. In fact, there are probably dinosaur types that still remain unidentified, reported Smithsonian Magazine. The three-metre problem encompasses that . 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. No fossil beds were yet known that could clearly show the details that might resolve these questions. Tanis is a significant site because it appears to record the events from the first minutes until a few hours after the impact of the giant Chicxulub asteroid in extreme detail. 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.. Instead, the layers had never fully solidified, the fossils at the site were fragile, and everything appeared to have been laid down in a single large flood. The first documents a turtle fossil found at Tanis, killed by impalement by a tree branch, and found in the upper of two units of surge deposit, bracketed by ejecta. There is still much unknown about these prehistoric animals. Robert DePalma, fdd 12 oktober 1981, r en amerikansk paleontolog och kurator . [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. While DePalma corrected his claim, his reputation still took a hit. Others defend DePalma, like his co-author, Mark Richards, a geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. Science asked other co-authors on the paper, including Manning, for comment, but none responded. Other papers describing the site and its fossils are in progress. Robert DePalma. To verify the study's claims, paleontologists say that DePalma must broaden access to the site and its material. But there were other inconsistencies at the excavation site the fossils they found seemed out of place, with some skeletons located in vertical positions. Images: Top right, Robert DePalma and Peter Larson conduct field research in Tanis. 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. 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 . Last modified on Fri 8 Apr 2022 11.20 EDT. 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. [2], A paper documenting Tanis was released as a prepublication on 1 April 2019. 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. 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. Was it a fierce volcanic eruption that toppled these creatures? [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. 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. DePalma says his team also invited Durings team to join DePalmas ongoing study. But relatively little fossil evidence is available from times nearer the crucial event, a difficulty known as the "Three metre problem". [5] The fish were not bottom feeders. Dinosaurs continue to fascinate, even though they became extinct 65 million years ago. 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. 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. 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.