A budding paleontologist's description of the 'Holy Grail' of fossil finds in a New Yorker feature has prompted widespread criticism
The claims were extravagant. It wasn’t just a remarkable find: a paleontological site in North Dakota’s Hell Creek formation that was chock full of impeccably preserved fossils. Those fossils were also so rare that some were the sole North American examples of their kind, including dinosaur feathers and a dinosaur egg containing an embryo.
“It’s like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the bony fingers of Jimmy Hoffa, sitting on top of the Lost Ark” is how Robert DePalma, a budding paleontologist and prime excavator of Tanis, described the find to journalist and thriller novelist Douglas Preston for a feature in the New Yorker magazine. The criticism is many-pronged. Much of it centres on what’s in the New Yorker article. According to scientific protocol, research findings—especially on this scale—should be first revealed in peer-reviewed scientific literature, not mainstream magazines.
Also, the most remarkable fossil details in the New Yorker piece—including anything to do with dinosaurs, apart from one mention in an appendix—were absent from the scientific paper and therefore unverifiable. DePalma’s explanation is that the asteroid strike in Mexico led to a strong earthquake whose seismic waves reverberated 3,000 kilometres across the continent to Tanis, triggering a seiche—a sloshing, oscillating wave—in a partly or fully enclosed sea water body nearby. That seiche piled up masses of dead and dying creatures into the valley that became the Tanis site, jumbling freshwater and marine creatures together and burying them in fine sediment.
To be sure, DePalma, a 37-year-old Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kansas, has invited not just Smit but also the legendary Walter Alvarez of the University of California, Berkeley—who helped come up with the theory that an asteroid caused the last extinction even before the discovery of the Chicxulub crater—to visit the site and be co-author.
DePalma’s Facebook photo features a sepia-toned image of him against a canvas tent backdrop, sporting an Indiana-Jones-style vest, knife and bullet-stocked belt. His comments make it clear this was an actual expedition rather than a pose. He’s been known to give talks in the glow of oil lamps for effect. “This guy is sort of doing cosplay,” says the Smithsonian’s Johnson.
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