I dont believe that Curtis himself went to another lab, he was ill for many years, Sacasa says. The findings each preclude correlation with either the Cantapeta or Breien, This page was last edited on 25 February 2023, at 16:30. Petrified fish with glass spheres, called ejecta, were also at the site. 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. In turn, the fish remains revealed the season their lives endedergo, the precise timing of the devastating asteroid strike to the Yucatn Peninsula. Such waves are called seiches: The 2011 Tohoku earthquake near Japan triggered 1.5-meter-tall seiches in Norwegian fjords 8000 kilometers away. 03/30/2022. Could NASA's Electric Airplane Make Aviation More Sustainable? Seasonal calibration of the end-cretaceous Chicxulub impact event - Nature With this deposit, we can chart what happened the day the Cretaceous died. 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 . Paleontologist accused of faking data in dino-killing asteroid paper "He could have stumbled on something amazing, but he has a reputation for making a lot out of a little.". The site lacked the fine sediment layers he was initially looking for. North Dakota site shows wreckage from same object that killed the Even as a child, DePalma wondered what the Cretaceous was like. An imagined dinosaur scene just after the asteroid strike that caused a mass extinction, from . All rights reserved. DePalma, Robert | Department of Geology Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. Such Konservat-Lagersttten are rare because they require special depositional circumstances. Could it be a comet, asteroid, or meteor that crashed into the planet, and the reverberations ended the reign of the dinosaurs? Gizmodo covered the research at the time. New Evidence May Shed Light on Extinction Event That Killed the - MSN . November 5, 2015. Robert DePalma - Wikipedia It comprises two layers with sand and silt grading (coarse sands at the bottom, finer silt/clay particles at the top). [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. [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. DePalma has not made public the raw, machine-produced data underlying his analyses. DePalma and his colleagues have been working at Tanis since 2012. "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 claim is the Tanis creatures were killed and entombed on the actual day a giant asteroid struck Earth. 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 season springtime, 66 million years agothanks to an analysis of fossilized fish remains at a famous site in North . If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that we cannot wait for a crisis to respond. 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 they can provide the raw data, its just a sloppy paper. More: Science Publisher Retracts 44 Papers for Being Utter Nonsense, We may earn a commission from links on this page. 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. "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. During visited Tanis in 2017, when she was a masters student at the Free University of Amsterdam. Dont yet have access? 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. He says the study published in Scientific Reports began long before During became interested in the topic and was published after extended discussions over publishing a joint paper went nowhere. The extinction event caused by this impact began the Cenozoic, in which mammals - including humans - would eventually come to dominate life on Earth. Robert DePalma made headlines again in 2021 with the discovery of a leg from a Thescelosaurus dinosaur at Tanis, reported The Washington Post. 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. Some scientists question Robert DePalma's methods. 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. 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. 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. They seem to have left the raw data out of the manuscript deliberately, he says. Help News from Science publish trustworthy, high-impact stories about research and the people who shape it. 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. 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. The Crude Life Interview: Robert Depalma, paleontologist They did a few years of digging, uncovering beautiful, fragile sh . If I were the editor, I would retract the paper unless [the raw data] were produced posthaste, he says. [8] Following suspicions of manipulating data, a complained was lodged against DePalma with the University of Manchester. There was no advanced decay. Its not clear where McKinney conducted these analyses, and raw data was not included in the published paper. This directly applies to today. DEPALMA Robert Michael DePalma Jr. of Columbus, Ohio passed away unexpectedly February 15, 2010 at the age of 26 years. A bad day for dinosaurs was the subject of an engaging hour-and-a-half for both paleontologists and NASA researchers. The mud and sand are dotted with glassy spherulesmany caught in the gills of the fishisotopically dated to 65.8 million years ago. Dinosaurs have been dead for so long,'" DePalma told The Washington Post. Robert DePalma made headlines again in 2021 with the discovery of a leg from a Thescelosaurus dinosaur at Tanis, reported The Washington Post. [22] The discovery received widespread media coverage from 29 March 2019. Asked where McKinney conducted his isotopic analyses, DePalma did not provide an answer. They had breathed in early debris that fell into water, in the seconds or minutes before death. Sir David Attenborough is to examine the mystery of the dinosaurs' last days in a BBC1/PBS/France Tlvisions feature film that will unearth a dig site hidden in the hills of North Dakota. 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. A North Dakota Excavation Had One Paleontologist Rethinking The The latter paper was published by a team led by Robert DePalma, Durings former collaborator and a paleontologist now at the University of Manchester. Tanis (fossil site) In June 2021, paleontologist Melanie During submitted a manuscript to Nature that she suspected might create a minor scientific sensation. Any water-borne waves would have arrived between 18 and 26 hours later,[1]:p.24 long after the microtektites had already fallen back to earth, and far too late to leave the geological record found at the site. There is still much unknown about these prehistoric animals. Fish were swept up in mud and sand in the aftermath of a great wave sparked by the Chicxulub impact, paleontologists say. 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 . We're seeing mass die-offs of animals and biomes that are being put through very stressful situations worldwide. They presumably formed from droplets of molten rock launched into the atmosphere at the impact site, which cooled and solidified as they plummeted back to Earth. 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. Paleontologist Accused of Making Up Data on Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Something is fishy here, says Mauricio Barbi, a high energy physicist at the University of Regina who specializes in applying physics methods to paleontology. Scarred Duckbill Dinosaur Escaped T. Rex Attack - National Geographic Notably, the powerful magnitude 9.0 9.1 Thoku earthquake in 2011, slower secondary waves traveled over 8,000km (5,000mi) in less than 30 minutes to cause seiches around 1.51.8m (4.95.9ft) high in Norway. During and Ahlberg, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, question whether they exist. At his suggestion, she wrote a formal letter to Scientific Reports. Paleontologists Find Perfectly Preserved Dinosaur Fossils From the Day It features what appear to be scanned printouts of manually typed tables containing the isotopic data from the fish fossils. During, whose paper was accepted by Nature shortly afterward and published in February, suspects that DePalma, eager to claim credit for the finding, wanted to scoop herand made up the data to stake his claim. 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. Fossil Site Reveals Day That Meteor Hit Earth and, Maybe, Wiped Out [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.