robert depalma paleontologist 2021 robert depalma paleontologist 2021

"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. Fossil Site Reveals Day That Meteor Hit Earth and, Maybe, Wiped Out 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. A New Look at the Day the Dinosaurs Were Extinguished Paleontologist Robert DePalma, featured in PBS's "Dinosaur Apocalypse," discusses an astonishing trove of fossils. [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]. "It's not just for paleo nerds. Robert DePalma made headlines again in 2021 with the discovery of a leg from a Thescelosaurus dinosaur at Tanis, reported The Washington Post. [5] The fish were not bottom feeders. Both papers made their conclusions based on analysis of fish remains at the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota. But there were other inconsistencies at the excavation site the fossils they found seemed out of place, with some skeletons located in vertical positions. Robert DEPALMA, Postgraduate Researcher | Cited by 253 | of The University of Manchester, Manchester | Read 18 publications | Contact Robert DEPALMA [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. A newly discovered winged raptor may have belonged to a lineage of dinosaurs that grew large after . DePalma believed that the fossils found in Tanis, which sat on the KT layer, became collected there just after the asteroid struck the earth. At his suggestion, she wrote a formal letter to Scientific Reports. He had already named the genus Dakotaraptor when others identified it as belonging to a prehistoric turtle. Robert DePalma. The mud and sand are dotted with glassy spherulesmany caught in the gills of the fishisotopically dated to 65.8 million years ago. The Boca Interview: Making Prehistory with Robert de Palma "Those few meters of rock record the wrath of the Chicxulub impact and the devastation it caused." 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, 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). 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 . "I've been asked, 'Why should we care about this? [1]:figure S29 pg.53 In 2022, a partial mummified Thescelosaurus was unearthed here with its skin still intact.[7]. DePalma's dinosaur study, published in Scientific Reports in December 2021, . He later wrote a piece for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. . ^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. Underneath a freshwater paddlefish skeleton, a mosasaur tooth appeared. It is not even clear whether the massive waves were able to traverse the entire Interior Seaway. In a recent article in The New Yorker, author Douglas Preston recounts his experience with paleontologist Robert DePalma, who uncovered some of the first evidence to settle these debates. Paleontologist Jack Horner, who had to revise his theory that the T. rex was solely a scavenger based on a previous finding from DePalma, told the New Yorker he didn't remember who DePalma was . She also removed DePalma as an author from her own manuscript, then under review at Nature. 2 / 4: Robert A. DePalma, a paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History and a graduate student at the University of Kansas. Until a few years ago, some researchers had suspected the last dinosaurs vanished thousands of years before the catastrophe. But a former colleague, Melanie During at Uppsala University, asserts that DePalma created data to support the conclusion. [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. The Hell Creek Formation was at this time very low-lying or partly submerged land at the northern end of the seaway, and the Chicxulub impact occurred in the shallow seas at the southern end, approximately 3,050km (1,900mi) from the site. The site was systematically excavated by Robert DePalma over several years beginning in 2012, working in near total secrecy. 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. Help News from Science publish trustworthy, high-impact stories about research and the people who shape it. If Tanis is all it is claimed to be, that debateand many others about this momentous day in Earth's historymay be over. Tanis: Fossil found of dinosaur killed in asteroid strike - BBC Point bars are common in mature or meandering streams. Ritchie Hall | Earth, Energy & Environment Center 1414 Naismith Drive, Room 254 Lawrence, KS 66045 geology@ku.edu 785-864-4974 DePalma's team says the killing is captured in forensic detail in the 1.3-meter-thick Tanis deposit, which it says formed in just a few hours, beginning perhaps 13 minutes after impact. 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. "He could have stumbled on something amazing, but he has a reputation for making a lot out of a little.". 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. 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. 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. What's potentially so special about this site? Robert DePalma reveals the Tanis site discoveries he couldn't talk about in Part One. In the BBC documentary, Robert DePalma, a relative of film director Brian De Palma, can be seen sporting an Indiana Jones-style fedora and tan shirt. The fish contain isotope records and evidence of how the animals growth corresponded to the season (tree rings do the same thing). I dont believe that Curtis himself went to another lab, he was ill for many years, Sacasa says. North Dakota site shows wreckage from same object that killed the 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). Additional fossils, including this beautifully preserved fish tail, have been found at the Tanis site in North Dakota. But McKinneys former department chair, Pablo Sacasa, says he is not aware of McKinney ever collaborating with laboratories at other institutions. DePalma characterizes their interactions differently. [1]:pg.11 Key findings were presented in two conference papers in October 2017. No fossil beds were yet known that could clearly show the details that might resolve these questions. [15][1]:p.8. Fragile remains spanning the layers of debris show that the site was laid down in a single event over a short timespan. 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. 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. UW News staff. Tanis is a site of paleontological interest in southwestern North Dakota, United States. 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 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. 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. Forum News Service, provided New Evidence Shows Experts Have Dinosaurs' Extinction All Wrong Robert has been an Adjunct Professor in the Geosciences . 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. Fossilized snapshot of mass death found on North Dakota ranch While some lived near a river, lake, lagoon, or another place where sediment was found, many thrived in other habitats. In the early 1980s, the discovery of a clay layer rich in iridium, an element found in meteorites, at the very end of the rock record of the Cretaceous at sites around the world led researchers to link an asteroid to the End Cretaceous mass extinction. "That's the first ever evidence of the interaction between life on the last day of the Cretaceous and the impact event," team member Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, told the publication. 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. Numerous famous fossils of plants and animals, including many types of dinosaur fossils, have been discovered there. 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 . 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. [1]:p.8193 The original paper describes the river in technical detail:[1]:Fig.1 and p.9181-8193. In December 2021, a team of paleontologists published data . 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. Robert DePalma, fdd 12 oktober 1981, r en amerikansk paleontolog och kurator . 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. 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. The deposit itself is about 1.3m thick, sharply overlaying the point bar, in a drape-like manner. DePalma has not made public the raw, machine-produced data underlying his analyses. 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. This is misconduct, During wrote in an email to Gizmodo. DePalma, Robert | Department of Geology [18], In 2004, DePalma was studying a small site in the well-known Hell Creek Formation, containing numerous layers of thin sediment, creating a geological record of great detail. 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 Thescelosaurus dinosaur at Tanis, reported The Washington Post. DePalma gave the name Tanis to both the site and the river. This dinosaur, a giant reptilian, lived during the Early Cretaceous period in oceans. . Asked where McKinney conducted his isotopic analyses, DePalma did not provide an answer. A researcher claims that Robert DePalma published a faulty study in order to get ahead of her own work on the Tanis fossil site. Hell Creek evidence pinpoints month of dinosaur extinction - Earth & Sky [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. 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. Stunning discovery offers glimpse of minutes following 'dinosaur-killer Han var redan som barn fascinerad av ben. Douglas Preston's writing about the discovery lauds it as one of the . During described the findings in her 2018 masters thesis, a copy of which she shared with DePalma in February 2019. [2], A paper documenting Tanis was released as a prepublication on 1 April 2019. Scientists may have found fragments of THE asteroid that wiped out the Dinosaur Fossil From Day Extinction Asteroid Hit Earth - Insider Though this might seem like a large number, a study intheProceedings of the National Academy of Sciencessaidit's possible that more than 1,800 different kinds of dinosaurs walked the earth. DePalma took over excavation rights on it several years ago from commercial fossil prospectors who discovered the site in 2008. 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. It needs to be explained. He declined to share details because the investigation is ongoing. Dinosaurs - The Final Day with David Attenborough: Directed by Matthew Thompson. Seasonal calibration of the end-cretaceous Chicxulub impact event - Nature 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. Images: Top right, Robert DePalma and Peter Larson conduct field research in Tanis. 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. Melanie During, a paleontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, submitted a paper for publication in the journal Nature in June 2021. When I saw [microtektites in their own impact craters], I knew this wasnt just any flood deposit. Several independent scientists consulted about the case by Science agreed the Scientific Reports paper contains suspicious irregularities, and most were surprised that the paperwhich they note contains typos, unresolved proofreaders notes, and several basic notation errorswas published in the first place. 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. And, if they are not forthcoming, there are numerous precedents for the retraction of scholarly articles on that basis alone.. Did Richard Sackler Go to Jail? Where is He Now? - The Cinemaholic By Robert Sanders, Media relations | March 29, 2019. Paleontologist Accused of Making Up Data on Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid He did send Science a document containing what he says are McKinneys data. We may earn a commission from links on this page. TV scientist accused of FAKING data in a major dinosaur study It comprises two layers with sand and silt grading (coarse sands at the bottom, finer silt/clay particles at the top). 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). Even as a child, DePalma wondered what the Cretaceous was like. Today, their fossils lie jumbled together at a site in North Dakota. During and Ahlberg, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, question whether they exist. 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 situation was first reported by the publication Science last month. (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 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. 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. Something is fishy here, says Mauricio Barbi, a high energy physicist at the University of Regina who specializes in applying physics methods to paleontology. Such a conclusion might provide the best evidence yet that at least some dinosaurs were alive to witness the asteroid impact. Many theories exist about why the dinosaurs disappeared from the Earth. With the exception of some ectothermic species such as the ancestors of the modern leatherback sea turtle and crocodiles, no tetrapods weighing more than 25kg (55lb) survived. Ultimately, both studies, which appeared in print within weeks of each other, were complementary and mutually reinforcing, he says. This explanation was proposed long before DePalma's discovery. Sir David Attenborough's Latest BBC Film To Unearth - Deadline Disbelievers of this supposition, though, point to the lack of fossils in the KT layer as proof that this thesis is false more fossils are discovered some 10 feet underneath the layer. [21], The site was originally a point bar - a gently sloped crescent-shaped area of deposit that accumulates on the inside bend of streams and rivers below the slip-off slope. Since 2013, Sackler has resided at a private property on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. An aspiring novelist, he attended The Ohio State University studying English and No part of Durings paper had any bearing on the content of our study, DePalma says. Robert DePalma uncovers a preserved articulated body of a 65-million-year-old fish at Tanis. Did the Dinosaurs Die on a Pleasant North Dakota Spring Day? Paleontologists Find Perfectly Preserved Dinosaur Fossils From the Day Dinosaurs continue to fascinate, even though they became extinct 65 million years ago. "I just hope this hasn't been oversensationalized.". 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. Some scientists say this destroyed the dinosaurs; others believe they thrived during the period. A bad day for dinosaurs was the subject of an engaging hour-and-a-half for both paleontologists and NASA researchers. By looking through this window into the past, we can apply these lessons to today. 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. . Episode #52: Your Mother Was a Vetulicolian and Your Father Smelt of Elderberries with Henry Gee . Some scientists were not happy with this proposal. In the early 1980s, the discovery of a clay layer rich in iridium, an element found in meteorites, at the very end of the rock record of the Cretaceous at sites around the world led researchers to link an asteroid to the End Cretaceous mass extinction. 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 . . 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. Published May 11, 2022 6:09PM (EDT) [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. 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. 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.. (DePalma and colleagues published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019 that described finding these spherules in different samples analyzed at another facility.). "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. 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. 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. Ive done quite a few excavations by now, and this was the most phenomenal site Ive ever worked on, During 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. Fish were swept up in mud and sand in the aftermath of a great wave sparked by the Chicxulub impact, paleontologists say. Robert Depalma, paleontologist, describes the meteor impact 66 million years ago that generated a tsunami-like wave in an inland sea that killed and buried f. 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 . 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. It reads: Editors Note: Readers are alerted that the reliability of data presented in this manuscript is currently in question. 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. 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.