[25] The last was published in December in Scientific Reports. 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. 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. 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. 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. The death scene from within an hour of the impact has been excavated at an unprecedented . 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. Boca paleontologist Robert de Palma uncovers evidence of the day the dinosaurs diedand how it connects to homo sapiens. Robert DePalma. During the long process of discussing these options they decided to submit their paper, he says. This whole site is the KT boundary We have the whole KT event preserved in these sediments. They had breathed in early debris that fell into water, in the seconds or minutes before death. 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. Robert DePalma is a paleontologist who holds the lease to the Tanis site and controls access to it. In December 2021, a team of paleontologists published data . 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. 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.. From the size of the deposits beneath the flood debris, the Tanis River was a "deep and large" river with a point bar that was towards the larger size found in Hell's Creek, suggesting a river tens or hundreds of meters wide. Even as a child, DePalma wondered what the Cretaceous was like. . Today, their fossils lie jumbled together at a site in North Dakota. It features what appear to be scanned printouts of manually typed tables containing the isotopic data from the fish fossils. By Dave Kindy. He has mined a fossil site in North Dakota secretly for . [18], DePalma began excavating systematically in 2012[1]:11 and quickly found the site to contain very unusual and promising features. Does fossil site record dino-killing impact? He had already named the genus Dakotaraptor when others identified it as belonging to a prehistoric turtle. The findings are the work of paleontologist Robert DePalma, who has previously attracted controversy. . The deposit itself is about 1.3m thick, sharply overlaying the point bar, in a drape-like manner. An aspiring novelist, he attended The Ohio State University studying English and Until a few years ago, some researchers had suspected the last dinosaurs vanished thousands of years before the catastrophe. (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. Searching in the hills of North Dakota, palaeontologist Robert DePalma makes an incredible . This is misconduct, During wrote in an email to Gizmodo. This dinosaur, a giant reptilian, lived during the Early Cretaceous period in oceans. 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. 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. "Robert has been meticulous, borderline archaeological in his excavation approach," says Manning, who has been working at Tanis from the beginning. [1]:p.8 Seiche waves often occur shortly after significant earthquakes, even thousands of miles away, and can be sudden and violent. When DePalmas paper was published just over 3 months later, During says she soon noticed irregularities in the figures, and she was concerned the authors had not published their raw data. 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. [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. In December 2021, a team of paleontologists published data . But not everyone has fully embraced the find, perhaps in part because it was first announced to the world last week in an article in The New Yorker. Also, there is little evidence on the detailed effects of the event on Earth and its biosphere. "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. 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. 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.. The extinction event caused by this impact began the Cenozoic, in which mammals - including humans - would eventually come to dominate life on Earth. If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that we cannot wait for a crisis to respond. 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. Tanis is a site of paleontological interest in southwestern North Dakota, United States. If not, well, fraud is on the table.. Special to The Forum. 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. DePalma did not respond to an email request for an interview. "It's not just for paleo nerds. In turn, the fish remains revealed the season their lives endedergo, the precise timing of the devastating asteroid strike to the Yucatn Peninsula. 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 . Its not clear where McKinney conducted these analyses, and raw data was not included in the published paper. 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 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. The claim is the Tanis creatures were killed and entombed on the actual day a giant asteroid struck Earth. [20] The sediment appeared to have liquefied and covered the deposited biota, then quickly solidified, preserving much of the contents in three dimensions. "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. After The New Yorker published "The Day the Dinosaurs Died," which details the discovery of a fossil site in Hell's Creek, North Dakota, by Robert DePalma a Kansas State PhD student and paleontologist, debates and discussions across the country arose over the article. All of these factors seemed strange and confused the paleontologists. Raw machine data are seldom supplied to end users (myself included) who contract for isotope analyses from a lab that does them., Cochran says DePalma erred in not including these data and their origins in his original manuscript, but the bottom line is that I have no reason to distrust the basic data or in any way believe that it was fabricated., Eiler disputes this. [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. Fossils from dinosaurs and other animals from thousands of years before the asteroid impact are very hard to come by, leading some to believe . 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. Appropriate editorial action will be taken once this matter is resolved.. During obtained extremely high-resolution x-ray images of the fossils at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France. Episode . Something is fishy here, says Mauricio Barbi, a high energy physicist at the University of Regina who specializes in applying physics methods to paleontology. "Those few meters of rock record the wrath of the Chicxulub impact and the devastation it caused."
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