DePalma found sloppy, but (probably) not fraudulent in an investigation on his publishing on this.
And a Gizmodo link.
Mostly sour grapes, then, since the initial accusation was outright fabrication of data and that doesn’t seem to be the case. Especially since it reaches the same conclusion as During’s paper, so the actual finding isn’t in dispute.
DePalma having sole control of Tanis really gets up other researchers’ noses.
I’m certainly guilty of less than ideal research practices. That said, it’s weird that nobody knows where the isotope analysis was performed or by whom, but, “the university will give DePalma the opportunity to redo the experiments.” So maybe we’ll get some clarity.
Fascinating articles and thread that I missed the first time around. I recall seeing some headlines around this discovery in 2019 but didn’t dig into it or grasp the importance of it.
One thing stands out to me as rather odd - why is DePalma still a PhD student over 10 years after beginning work on the site? Is it usual for it to take such an extended period of time to earn a doctorate in paleontology?
Considering how long paleontology took, it’s instantaneous.
:deadpan:
A new article on the drama around Tanis. An interesting read if you skim past the 70 percent that is needless bloat.
An excerpt from the new article:
Robert DePalma is, in 2024, 43 years old and still a graduate student, despite having been handed what may or may not be the most spectacular paleontological site in the country. He is by many accounts a brilliant geologist. A student of his I spoke to described him as an extraordinary teacher. But he is not academic. He struggles with parts of paleontology that do not belong in a living-history segment. He does not enjoy publishing; he sees forward to the possibility of criticism. “The dread is, Oh God, then there’s going to be jealous people,” he says. “There’s going to be people kicking you in the tail over it.” DePalma’s master’s thesis is, according to Smit, unreadable.
In our time in the field, DePalma would almost never mention, without prompting, the world of academic paleontology. He talked about how cool it would be to 3-D print a fossil. He talked about making a film, maybe anime, maybe CGI, from the perspective of an animal that died when the asteroid struck. He showed me a delicate, in-process reconstruction of a rattlesnake. Once in grad school, he had gone to enormous lengths to reconstruct a model of a lungfish in its burrow. “Why did you do this?” he recalls a professor asking him. “Are you studying this? Is this for a paper?”
“I told him time and again,” Smit says, “‘You lay your claims by going to a conference, give a talk, give an abstract.’ And apparently he thought, No, no, no. Then I’m giving away the science. And I couldn’t convince him of the contrary. It’s an imaginary problem for him, so he kept silent about it for a long time. He kept silent about the feathers. He kept silent about the discoveries. And now with Melanie, it sort of overtakes him. I mean, you cannot keep silent for eight years and then not publish anything. That’s not what you do in the modern world. That’s why I say he is a Romantic from the 19th century, but not in a modern, highly competitive field of science. And Melanie is quite the opposite.”
And
There have been, in the decade since DePalma claimed to have found a dinosaur feather, a mammal burrow, and a pterosaur egg, no resultant publications on these particular finds. Academic paleontologists must keep their fossils publicly accessible; they might be kept at the Field Museum or the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. They are given accession numbers, attached to a museum or university, which researchers use to refer to and request them, as with library books. DePalma is associated with the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History, which is a storefront in a mall, but his finds are not displayed there. When Frost Museum paleontologist Cary Woodruff called the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History asking for a cast of a Dakotaraptor claw DePalma had found, he was put off for about three years by an “exasperated and apologetic” museum employee. Finally, he says he was told by the museum that DePalma kept the bones in his home, in a safe. “As paleontologists,” Woodruff says, incredulous, “we do not store fossils at our house.” (DePalma, asked if he has kept bones at his home, suggests the employee was joking.) When I asked about the staggering fossils described in The New Yorker, DePalma said they were at Florida Atlantic University, where he teaches, and which did not respond to requests for comment.
Paleontologists who might have felt cautiously skeptical in 2019 are now openly and vocally baffled. “No one’s ever published a dinosaur feather from anywhere in North America,” says Johnson. “He has dinosaur feathers. Why didn’t he show us a picture of them? That’d be the cover of Nature. If he had a pterosaur egg, why didn’t he publish? These would be amazing, major discoveries if they were true. “
In the New Yorker feature, DePalma unwraps “a sixteen-inch fossil feather” and holds it “in his palms like a piece of Lalique glass.” “I mean this is just some cartoon, made-up idea of what paleontology is like,” says Jingmai O’Conner, the Field Museum curator who spent ten years working in China, where most fossil feathers have been found. “Fossil feathers don’t preserve three dimensionally in ways that you could hold them, unless they’re in amber. But then you’re actually holding a chunk of amber.”
In other words, he is probably eccentric at best, possibly a crank.