The deposit may also provide some of the strongest evidence yet that nonbird dinosaurs were still thriving on impact day. Bde hans far och hans farfars bror var kirurger i Florida. Ahlberg shared her concerns. There was a fossil everywhere I turned., After she returned to Amsterdam, During asked DePalma to send her the samples she had dug up, mostly sturgeon fossils. Also, there is little evidence on the detailed effects of the event on Earth and its biosphere. 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. 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. ", Since Tanis became an excavation site, several other fossils were found, including a pterosaur embryo. While DePalma corrected his claim, his reputation still took a hit. Robert DePalma is a paleontologist who holds the lease to the Tanis site and controls access to it.. In June 2021, paleontologist Melanie During submitted a manuscript to Nature that she suspected might create a minor scientific sensation. He declined to share details because the investigation is ongoing. Could NASA's Electric Airplane Make Aviation More Sustainable? [1]:p.8193 The original paper describes the river in technical detail:[1]:Fig.1 and p.9181-8193. Melanie During, a paleontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, submitted a paper for publication in the journal Nature in June 2021. At the site, called Tanis, the researchers say they have discovered the chaotic debris left when tsunamilike waves surged up a river valley. 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. There was no advanced decay. . 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. DePalma's dinosaur study, published in Scientific Reports in December 2021, . A wealth of other evidence has persuaded most researchers that the impact played some role in the extinctions. If not, well, fraud is on the table.. Dinosaurs have been dead for so long,'" DePalma told The Washington Post. By Dave Kindy. 01/05/2021. Robert DePalma reveals the Tanis site discoveries he couldn't talk about in Part One. 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. Manning points out that all fossils described in the PNAS paper have been deposited in recognized collections and are available for other researchers to study. [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. "I hope this is all legit I'm just not 100% convinced yet," said Thomas Tobin, a geologist at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Perhaps no animal, living or dead, has captivated the world in the way that dinosaurs have. By Nicole Karlis Senior Writer. ", "Tanis exhibits a depositional scenario that was unusual in being highly conducive to exceptional (largely three dimensional) preservation of many articulated carcasses (Konservat-Lagersttte). Top left, a shocked mineral from Tanis. 2 / 4: Robert A. DePalma, a paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History and a graduate student at the University of Kansas. When I saw [microtektites in their own impact craters], I knew this wasnt just any flood deposit. Robert has been an Adjunct Professor in the Geosciences . [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. [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. Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. paper] may be fabricated, created to fit an already known conclusion. (She also posted the statement on the OSF Preprints server today.). In fact, there are probably dinosaur types that still remain unidentified, reported Smithsonian Magazine. Han vxte upp i Boca Raton i Florida. 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. (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. Does fossil site record dino-killing impact? 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Today, the layer of debris, ash and soot resulting from the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth's sediment. Many theories exist about why the dinosaurs disappeared from the Earth. DePalma's team argues that as seismic waves from the distant impact reached Tanis minutes later, the shaking generated 10-meter waves that surged from the sea up the river valley, dumping sediment and both marine and freshwater organisms there. 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. 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. 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). 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. Episode . That same year, encouraged by a Dutch award for the thesis, she began to prepare a journal article. Petrified fish with glass spheres, called ejecta, were also at the site. 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. Last modified on Fri 8 Apr 2022 11.20 EDT. DePalma may also flout some norms of paleontology, according to The New Yorker, by retaining rights to control his specimens even after they have been incorporated into university and museum collections. 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 . When one paleontologist began excavating a dig site in the mountains of North Dakota, he soon discovered new dinosaur evidence that may change history. DePalma holds the lease to the Tanis site, which sits on private land, and controls access to it. DePalma, now a Ph.D. student at the University of Manchester, vehemently denies any wrongdoing. 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. 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. Eiler agrees. [1]:p.8, Although Tanis and Chicxulub were connected by the remaining Interior Seaway, the massive water waves from the impact area were probably not responsible for the deposits at Tanis. A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 378, Issue 6625. 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. "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. View Obituary & Service Information 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. Melanie During suspects Robert DePalma wanted to claim credit for identifying the dinosaur-killing asteroid's season of impact and fabricated data in order to be able to publish a paper . The co-authors included Walter Alvarez and Jan Smit, both renowned experts on the K-Pg impact and extinction. 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. [20] The sediment appeared to have liquefied and covered the deposited biota, then quickly solidified, preserving much of the contents in three dimensions. "I'm suspicious of the findings. 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. However, because it is rare in any case for animals and plants to be fossilized, the fossil record leaves some major questions unanswered. 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. 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. And mass spectrometry revealed the paddlefishs fin bones had elevated levels of carbon-13, an isotope that is more abundant in modern paddlefishand presumably their closely related ancient relativesduring spring, when they eat more zooplankton rich in carbon-13. [2][3] The full paper introducing Tanis was widely covered in worldwide media on 29 March 2019, in advance of its official publication three days later. "He could have stumbled on something amazing, but he has a reputation for making a lot out of a little.". Such Konservat-Lagersttten are rare because they require special depositional circumstances. May 9, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT. But others question DePalma's interpretations. The 1960 Valdivia Chile earthquake was the most powerful ever recorded, estimated at magnitude 9.4 to 9.6. The latter paper was published by a team led by Robert DePalma, Durings former collaborator and a paleontologist now at the University of Manchester. DePalma gave the name Tanis to both the site and the river. The Dakotaraptor fossil, next to a paleontologist for scale. 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. Study leader Robert DePalma conducts field research at the Tanis site. [25] The last was published in December in Scientific Reports. Vid fyra rs lder fick han p ett museum . A Triceratops or other ceratopsian ilium (hip bone) was found at the high water mark, in circumstances hinting that the dinosaur might speculatively have been a floating carcass and possibly alive at or just before impact,[5] but the paper describing such remains was still in progress as of 2019[6] the initial papers only include a photograph and its location within Tanis. If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that we cannot wait for a crisis to respond. Robert DePalma made headlines again in 2021 with the discovery of a leg from a Thescelosaurus dinosaur at Tanis, reported The Washington Post. 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. One of these is whether dinosaurs were already declining at the time of the event due to ongoing volcanic climate change. He has mined a fossil site in North Dakota secretly for . The chief editor of Scientific Reports, Rafal Marszalek, says the journal is aware of concerns with the paper and is looking into them. The site was systematically excavated by Robert DePalma over several years beginning in 2012, working in near total secrecy. But just one dinosaur bone is discussed in the PNAS studyand it is mentioned in a supplement document rather than in the paper itself. JPS.C.2021.0002: The Paleontology, Geology and Taphonomy of the Tooth Draw Deposit; Hell Creek Formation (Maastrictian), Butte County, South Dakota. 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. During obtained extremely high-resolution x-ray images of the fossils at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France. Paleontologist Robert DePalma believes he has found evidence of the first minutes to hours of that catastrophic event. The Tanis site was first identified in 2008 and has been the focus of fieldwork by paleontologist Robert DePalma since . The day 66 million years ago when the reign of the dinosaurs ended and the rise of . In the caravan are microscopes . Get more great content like this delivered right to you! "It saddens me that folks are so quick to knock a study," he says. Such a conclusion might provide the best evidence yet that at least some dinosaurs were alive to witness the asteroid impact. But a former colleague, Melanie During at Uppsala University, asserts that DePalma created data to support the conclusion. A field assistant, Rudy Pascucci, left, and the paleontologist Robert DePalma, right, at DePalma's dig site. Ive done quite a few excavations by now, and this was the most phenomenal site Ive ever worked on, During says. Robert A. DePalma, a paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History and a graduate student at the University of Kansas. Page numbers in this section refer to those papers. 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. "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. Robert DePalma (right) and Walter Alvarez (left) at the Tanis site in North Dakota. All rights reserved. "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. December 10, 2021 Source: . 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 bottom line is that this case will just involve bluster and smoke-blowing until the authors produce a primary record of their lab work, adds John Eiler, a geochemist and isotope analysis expert at the California Institute of Technology. How to Know If the Heat Is Making You Sick. Tanis is a site of paleontological interest in southwestern North Dakota, United States. Fish were swept up in mud and sand in the aftermath of a great wave sparked by the Chicxulub impact, paleontologists say. [1]:p.8192 The river flowed Eastward (other than impact driven waves),[1]:p.8192 with inland being to the West; Tanis itself was therefore in an ancient river valley close to the Westward shore of the Interior Seaway. [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]. 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. [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. She also removed DePalma as an author from her own manuscript, then under review at Nature. 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. 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. 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. Underneath a freshwater paddlefish skeleton, a mosasaur tooth appeared. Tanis is a rich fossil site that contains a bevy of marine creatures that apparently died in the immediate fallout of the asteroid impact, or the KT extinction. Despite more than 200 years of study, paleontologists have named only several hundred species. Both papers studied 66-million-year-old paddlefish jawbones and sturgeon fin spines from Tanis. 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. He says the reviewers for the higher-profile journal made requests that were unreasonable for a paper that simply outlines the discovery and initial analysis of Tanis. The findings each preclude correlation with either the Cantapeta or Breien, This page was last edited on 25 February 2023, at 16:30. . Other geologists say they can't shake a sense of suspicion about DePalma himself, who, along with his Ph.D. work, is also a curator at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History in Wellington, Florida. They're perfectly preserved, Robert DePalma, paleontologist, via CNN. In turn, the fish remains revealed the season their lives endedergo, the precise timing of the devastating asteroid strike to the Yucatn Peninsula. However, two independent scientists who reviewed the data behind the paper shortly after its publication say they were satisfied with its authenticity and have no reason to distrust it. Their team successfully removed fossil field jackets that contained articulated sturgeons, paddlefish, and bowfins. 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. 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 . The site was originally discovered in 2008 by University of North Georgia Professor Steve Nicklas and field paleontologist Rob Sula. An imagined dinosaur scene just after the asteroid strike that caused a mass extinction, from . The event included waves with at least 10 meters run-up height (the vertical distance a wave travels after it reaches land). Kansas University, via Agence France-Presse Getty Images [10][11] The impactor tore through the earth's crust, creating huge earthquakes, giant waves, and a crater 180 kilometers (112mi) wide, and blasted aloft trillions of tons of dust, debris, and climate-changing sulfates from the gypsum seabed, and it may have created firestorms worldwide. Some scientists question Robert DePalma's methods. Recognizing the unique nature of the site, Nicklas and Sula brought in Robert DePalma, a University of Kansas graduate student, to perform additional excavations. 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. Fragile remains spanning the layers of debris show that the site was laid down in a single event over a short timespan. Of his discovery, DePalma said, "It's like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the .
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