May 9, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT. He declined to share details because the investigation is ongoing. Robert DePalma, fdd 12 oktober 1981, r en amerikansk paleontolog och kurator . The paleontologist Robert DePalma excavating a tangle of plant and animal fossils at the Tanis site in North Dakota. "Those few meters of rock record the wrath of the Chicxulub impact and the devastation it caused." It is not even clear whether the massive waves were able to traverse the entire Interior Seaway. Robert DePalma reveals the Tanis site discoveries he couldn't talk about in Part One. 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.His advisor suggested seeking a similar site, closer to the K-Pg boundary layer. 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. Today, their fossils lie jumbled together at a site in North Dakota. He did send Science a document containing what he says are McKinneys data. 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. Asked where McKinney conducted his isotopic analyses, DePalma did not provide an answer. They're perfectly preserved, Robert DePalma, paleontologist, via CNN. 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. DePalma has not made public the raw, machine-produced data underlying his analyses. 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. Others defend DePalma, like his co-author, Mark Richards, a geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. 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. 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. Help News from Science publish trustworthy, high-impact stories about research and the people who shape it. 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. 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. 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. DePalma holds the lease to the Tanis site, which sits on private land, and controls access to it. A A. Paleontologist Robert DePalma has done it again. Page numbers in this section refer to those papers. 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. Also, there is little evidence on the detailed effects of the event on Earth and its biosphere. 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. Published May 11, 2022 6:09PM (EDT) Its not clear where McKinney conducted these analyses, and raw data was not included in the published paper. [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. Last modified on Fri 8 Apr 2022 11.20 EDT. He did so, and later also sent a partial paddlefish fossil he had excavated himself. ", "Tanis exhibits a depositional scenario that was unusual in being highly conducive to exceptional (largely three dimensional) preservation of many articulated carcasses (Konservat-Lagersttte). As a part of the settlement, the Sacklers will have immunity against any and all future civil litigation. Please make a tax-deductible gift today. 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. The story of the discoveries is revealed in a new documentary called "Dinosaur Apocalypse," which features naturalist Sir David Attenborough and paleontologist Robert DePalma and airs . "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. As detailed by Science, the isotopic data in DePalmas paper was collected by archaeologist Curtis McKinney, who died in 2017. A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 378, Issue 6625. . Everything he found had been covered so quickly that details were exceptionally well preserved, and the fossils as a whole formed a very unusual collection fish fins and complete fish, tree trunks with amber, fossils in upright rather than squashed flat positions, hundreds or thousands of cartilaginous fully articulated freshwater paddlefish, sturgeon and even saltwater mosasaurs which had ended up on the same mudbank miles inland (only about four fossilized fish were previously known from the entire Hell Creek formation), fragile body parts such as complete and intact tails, ripped from the seafish's bodies and preserved inland in a manner that suggested they were covered almost immediately after death, and everywhere millions of tiny spheres of glassy material known as microtektites, the result of tiny splatters of molten material reaching the ground. They seem to have left the raw data out of the manuscript deliberately, he says. Other papers describing the site and its fossils are in progress. Three papers were published in 2021. By Nicole Karlis Senior Writer. .mw-parser-output .citation{word-wrap:break-word}.mw-parser-output .citation:target{background-color:rgba(0,127,255,0.133)}^Note 1 This section is drawn from the original 2019 paper[1] and its supplementary materials,[4] which describe the site in detail. 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). 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.. This is misconduct, During wrote in an email to Gizmodo. No fossil beds were yet known that could clearly show the details that might resolve these questions. 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. The co-authors included Walter Alvarez and Jan Smit, both renowned experts on the K-Pg impact and extinction. 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. But just one dinosaur bone is discussed in the PNAS studyand it is mentioned in a supplement document rather than in the paper itself. DePalma characterizes their interactions differently. [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. 03/30/2022. The extinction event caused by this impact began the Cenozoic, in which mammals - including humans - would eventually come to dominate life on Earth. By looking through this window into the past, we can apply these lessons to today. Manning confirms rumors that the study was initially submitted to a journal with a higher impact factor before it was accepted at PNAS. 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. "That some competitors have cast Robert in a negative light is unfortunate and unfair," Richards told Science. When the dino-killing asteroid struck Earth, shock waves would have caused a massive water surge in the shallows, researchers say, depositing sedimentary layers that entombed plants and animals killed in the event. During described the findings in her 2018 masters thesis, a copy of which she shared with DePalma in February 2019. [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. "That some competitors have cast Robert in a negative light is unfortunate and unfair," says another co-author, Mark Richards, a geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. "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. [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. Eiler agrees. The death scene from within an hour of the impact has been excavated at an unprecedented . View Obituary & Service Information She also removed DePalma as an author from her own manuscript, then under review at Nature. Images: Top right, Robert DePalma and Peter Larson conduct field research in Tanis. Fish were swept up in mud and sand in the aftermath of a great wave sparked by the Chicxulub impact, paleontologists say. 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. 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. We're seeing mass die-offs of animals and biomes that are being put through very stressful situations worldwide. During and Ahlberg, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, question whether they exist. All rights reserved. When one paleontologist began excavating a dig site in the mountains of North Dakota, he soon discovered new dinosaur evidence that may change history. If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that we cannot wait for a crisis to respond. A fossil site in North Dakota records a stunningly detailed picture of the devastation minutes after an asteroid slammed into Earth about 66 million years ago, a group of paleontologists argue in a paper due out this week. Robert DePalma made headlines again in 2021 with the discovery of a leg from a Thescelosaurus dinosaur at Tanis, reported The Washington Post. (Courtesy of Robert DePalma) You and your team have made some extraordinary finds, including an exquisitely preserved leg of a dinosaur that you believed died on the very day of the asteroid impact. With this deposit, we can chart what happened the day the Cretaceous died. Bde hans far och hans farfars bror var kirurger i Florida. 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. Vid fyra rs lder fick han p ett museum . DePalma took over excavation rights on it several years ago from commercial fossil prospectors who discovered the site in 2008. Help News from Science publish trustworthy, high-impact stories about research and the people who shape it. "It's not just for paleo nerds. 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. 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. Such a conclusion might provide the best evidence yet that at least some dinosaurs were alive to witness the asteroid impact. Sackler has three children Rebecca, Marianna, and David with his now ex-wife, Beth Sackler. . But the fossils also held clues to the season of the catastrophe, During found. Discoveries shed new light on the day the dinosaurs died. [1]:p.8 Instead, the initial papers on Tanis conclude that much faster earthquake waves, the primary waves travelling through rock at about 5km/s (11,000mph),[1]:p.8 probably reached Hell Creek within six minutes, and quickly caused massive water surges known as seiches in the shallow waters close to Tanis. Today, the layer of debris, ash and soot resulting from the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth's sediment. [8] The site continues to be explored. 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. Episode #52: Your Mother Was a Vetulicolian and Your Father Smelt of Elderberries with Henry Gee . 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. 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. posted a statement on the journal feedback website PubPeer, a document containing what he says are McKinneys data, 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, Paleontologist accused of fraud in paper on dino-killing asteroid, Scientist-Consultants Accuse OSI of Missing the Pattern, Journal will not retract influential paper by botanist accused of plagiarism and fraud. Episode . Taylor Mickal/NASA. The deposit itself is about 1.3m thick, sharply overlaying the point bar, in a drape-like manner. The Byte reports that the amber was found 2,000 miles away from the asteroid crater off the coast of Mexico believed to be . 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. 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. 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 . This program was also aired as "Dinosaur Apocalypse: The Last Day" on PBS Nova starting 11 May 2022.[9][32]. After trying to discuss the matter with editors at Scientific Reports for nearly a year, During recently decided to make her suspicions public. Ritchie Hall | Earth, Energy & Environment Center 1414 Naismith Drive, Room 254 Lawrence, KS 66045 geology@ku.edu 785-864-4974 Since 2012, paleontologist Robert DePalma has been excavating a site in North Dakota that he thinks is "an incredible and unprecedented discovery". 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 . 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. According to the Science article, During suspects that DePalma, eager to claim credit for the finding, wanted to scoop herand made up the data to stake his claim.. "After a while, we decided it wasn't a good route to go down," he says. Was it a fierce volcanic eruption that toppled these creatures? 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. Despite more than 200 years of study, paleontologists have named only several hundred 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. The chief editor of Scientific Reports, Rafal Marszalek, says the journal is aware of concerns with the paper and is looking into them. Something is fishy here, says Mauricio Barbi, a high energy physicist at the University of Regina who specializes in applying physics methods to paleontology. With Gizmodos Molly Taft | Techmodo. Study leader Robert DePalma conducts field research at the Tanis site. Tanis is a significant site because it appears to record the events from the first minutes until . Over the next 2 years, During says she made repeated attempts to discuss authorship with DePalma, but he declined to join her paper. The fact that spherules were found in the fishes gills suggested the animals died in the minutes to hours after the impact. [15][1]:p.8. While some lived near a river, lake, lagoon, or another place where sediment was found, many thrived in other habitats. Bottom left, micro-CT image showing cutaway of clay-altered ejecta spherule with internal core of unaltered impact glass. 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. The deposit may also provide some of the strongest evidence yet that nonbird dinosaurs were still thriving on impact day. The site, dubbed "Tanis," first underwent excavation in 2012, with DePalma and his team digging along a section known as the Hell Creek Formation (via Boredom Therapy). Such waves are called seiches: The 2011 Tohoku earthquake near Japan triggered 1.5-meter-tall seiches in Norwegian fjords 8000 kilometers away. 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. 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. They did a few years of digging, uncovering beautiful, fragile sh . AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. Robert DePalma uncovers a preserved articulated body of a 65-million-year-old fish at Tanis. The study of these creatures is limited to the fossils they left behind and those provide an incomplete picture. [8] Following suspicions of manipulating data, a complained was lodged against DePalma with the University of Manchester. "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. He later wrote a piece for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That same year, encouraged by a Dutch award for the thesis, she began to prepare a journal article. Appropriate editorial action will be taken once this matter is resolved.. No part of Durings paper had any bearing on the content of our study, DePalma says. 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. What we do know is that during the Jurassic period, great global upheaval occurred with increases in temperature, surging sea levels, and less humidity. The site was originally discovered in 2008 by University of North Georgia Professor Steve Nicklas and field paleontologist Rob Sula. (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. But others question DePalma's interpretations. Robert DePalma is a paleontologist who holds the lease to the Tanis site and controls access to it. Their team successfully removed fossil field jackets that contained articulated sturgeons, paddlefish, and bowfins. Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. [22] The discovery received widespread media coverage from 29 March 2019. [26][27][28][29] A paper published in Scientific Reports in December 2021 suggested that the impact took place in the Spring or Early Summer, based on the cyclical isotope curves found in acipensieriform fish bones at the site, and other evidence. He reportedly helps fund his fieldwork by selling replicas of his finds to private collectors.