The story of this guy is very inspiring. Unlike silicon valley engineers who tend to work hard in anticipation of big payouts, this guy has been working hard for years for his seemingly true passion of paleontology. We need more people like him in every field and especially in the silicon valley.
I think there are enough high quality open source or research projects to show that it's not only about the payouts in our field either...
One thing I find remarkable in this story: extensively working in the field (=literally/outside) -- opposed to following conventional "publish or perish" advice advancing his PhD in a more predictable manner...
Unknown of paleontologist spent several years digging up a site which records the K-T impact. Complete with whole fossils, raining debris from the meteor, the whole 9 yards. The site includes a variety of animals, including dinosaurs, who died on that day. We can even place the time of year from the plant fossils.
A well-known science journalist has been to the site and verifies that he isn't making it up.
The paleontologist's working assumption was that it was the result of a tsunami. However it appears instead to be the result of a seiche - the earthquake from the meteor sloshing water back and forth, destroying everything. So the entire site captures the last hour of the K-T zone. (Plus one random mammal that tunneled into the site some time later and died in its burrow.)
This is one of the most important paleontological sites ever found.
That thread doesn't describe any actual holes -- i.e., nothing which definitely refutes the researchers' claims -- it's just a lot of generic "I don't think science should be done this way" stone-throwing.
Which, okay, there's a conversation to be had there, but don't mistake it as weakening the importance of the find.
It's possible that the New Yorker has another Jonah Lehrer writing for them. It's possible that this author has conspired with a paleontologist to craft a total fabrication and describe mammal burrows that don't actually exist. It's possible that several other paleontologists are all participating in this fabrication, with the certain knowledge that it will destroy their careers and their reputation before very long.
Or, alternatively, this particular paleontologist happened to be in the right place at the right time, and because of some past experiences, has developed an unconventional approach to handling his discoveries. Other researchers are participating, cautiously at first, and then getting excited by what they find. And, even if the working hypothesis -- that this site is a record of the last hours of the Cretaceous period -- turns out to be false for some reason, everyone is still working in good faith on what will turn out to be a monumentally important find anyway.
It's a tough call, but I'm leaning towards the latter at the moment. Time will tell, I suppose.
I stopped reading and started skimming at the complaint that DePalma dresses like Indiana Jones. Good. It would behoove many professions to dress well again. I hope this age of slob ends soon.
And what's with the indigenous people non-sequitur? There were no people, indigenous or elsewhere, 60 million years ago.
I stopped reading and started skimming at the complaint that DePalma dresses like Indiana Jones
That's a shame, it's actually a good article. However, how would you dress if you had to spend hours a day on your belly under the desert sun? Perhaps it's just a practical way to dress and the journalist was just exercising some artistic license?
And the twitter thread is what is good and should be read.
The piece in the NewYorker makes it look like DePalma's work makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of the extinction of the dinosaurs, while the twitter thread (and https://twitter.com/SteveBrusatte/status/1111669545285107714 cited therein) point out that the actual paper published about the discovery doesn't even mention dinosaours and that DePalma is just acting as "a pulp novel caricature of a paleontologist" following the established script of "Go to the press, get your fame, let the academics argue while the public goes 'Wowwww'". All the while violating the embargo on the paper.
the "actual" paper hasn't been published yet, if you read the article you would see that most of the details have been secret. also this article does mention dinosaurs on two accounts, perhaps the first feathers ever found at hell's creater were found at this digsite as well as the hipbone of another dinosaur
The complaint in that tweet was not in itself about the clothing style, but about DePalma's whole public behaviour that clearly tries to put media impact above scientific method.
You are being intellectually lazy and superficial by not reading the whole tweet and just discarding the argument at the first instant you see something that grates you if taken out of context.
I think they should have a bit of fun among themselves even if just how one dress. I did note one of the girls dressed d. park in one of the news. So be her.
Important to note that the initial paper is not even out yet. It is supposed to be a foundation paper that does not focus on dinosaurs. It doesn't seem like this Twitter thread shows any true holes and I don't think the poster is a researcher.
The writer of the twitter thread is Brian Switek, who has written several books on dinosaurs. You can do your own search based on his name to see his credentials.
In any case, Neil Shubin, the discoverer of Tiktaalik, has posted this comment [1], in which he takes issue with the way the New Yorker article broke an embargo.
What does he have to do to earn his phd? It cannot be that every paleontologist has to make an incredible discovery that shines forever. My CS Phd was not like that. Why hasn't just a few of these things been enough for this fellow to get his PhD, if there is anything to it.
This smells slightly off. A bit too smooth, a bit too fortuitous, a bit too jackpot, a bit too good to be quite true.
If it is what it claims to be, then hats off and wow, incredible find and a true milestone. But until until the whole process of papper and peers is well under way, I shall take the story with a wagonload of salt.
Uh, hello? This is not "front page of HN for a day" important. This is one of the most important findings in paleontology ever. If even half of the claims made about this site are true, then its importance is on par with the Burgess Shale. We likely now know the season the dinosaurs went extinct (it's the Fall). This is like getting to drop a net in the ocean one day in the Cretacious and keeping whatever comes up, but has plant life as well. It's not really a stretch to think the sediment here could even give us insight into the physics of meteor impacts! But all I can find online about this is that some popular science author posted an angry rant about it on twitter.
I'm not a scientist or anything. I'm some guy who took an interest in dating the Cretacious-Paleogene (K-T or KPB or K-Pg, etc.) extinction event last year. My perspective is narrow and biased. But no one seems to be willing to comment on this, so I felt compelled to dig up some information and report. In short: this is real, and it's huge. Read the New Yorker article, and [1].
It's okay to take issue with the way these findings have been presented, but there's no reason to doubt the truth of the claims made in articles about this finding. DePalma is not a well-established scientist, but his collaboraters are respected and influential researchers. Walter Alvarez is probably the second most famous dinosaur researcher alive, having co-created the impact hypothesis in the first place. Jan Smit, while not as prominent in the public eye, is likely the world's leading expert on K-T dating. I have personally also been impressed with the work of Klaudia Kuiper, who has made significant progress over the last two decades in improving the accuracy of radioisotope dating—specifically 40Ar/39Ar, the current most precise method.
These people are not likely to fabricate a finding, much less one which would be instantly discovered when other scientists are allowed to access the site. Alvarez, in addition to already being famous, is 78 year old! Smit is 70 and retired, and shows no attention-seeking behavior as far as I can tell. It's nearly impossible to even find a word written about the man. It's also very unlikely that they would be mistaken about the nature of the find. If conference abstracts are to be believed, then multiple independent lines of evidence point very precisely to this event being associated with the Chicxulub impact. It's worth noting that [3] gives an Ar/Ar date of 66.03 mya for glass shards found at Tanis, which is exceedingly close to dates Kuiper (presumably using the same lab or labs) has found for zircons known to be from the K-T boundary.
People seem to be concerned about there being no actual dinosaurs in the site. Even if you believe fish are boring and only care about land fauna (I will admit to leaning that way myself), marine life is still hugely important for its ability to tell us about the environmental conditions at the time. Likewise for plants: don't you care at all about what the earth looked like as dinosaurs roamed? Listen: we have plenty of dinosaur bones. This site is actually much more valuable than typical beds of large animal skeletons because it preserves soft tissue and vegetable matter that we rarely ever encounter in this condition. And again, even if you are absolutely sure you only care about facts about dinosaurs themselves, more information about their surroundings is useful. Knowing about what a herbivorous dinosaur ate, with some detective work to find what adaptations this diet would require, is likely to tell us about this animal's behavior and posture as well.
That said, there are dinosaurs. The site contains "dinosaur tracks from two species, says Jan Smit" ([2]; also mentioned in scientific source [3]). The Berkeley press release [1] says Smit mentionsed the "buried body of a Triceratops and a duck-billed hadrosaur", although it doesn't go into detail about condition or say whether the hadrosaur is complete or fragmentary (the Triceratops is a "partial carcass"). And given that all the author's other claims seem to hold up, I am inclined to believe the New Yorker article when it says large feathers and an egg with embryo were found at Tanis.
The mammal burrow is discussed in [5]. That alone would be a huge find and given the authors I find it unbelievable for it to be a fabrication.
This sure looks like the real deal and I'm looking forward to the PNAS article that is coming out next week, "Prelude to extinction: a seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the KPg boundary, North Dakota". It is a bit disappointing that these press articles are coming out before people can read the science journal article. Don't see any pre-prints anywhere.
> The most immediate effects of the terminal-Cretaceous Chicxulub impact, essential to understanding the global-scale environmental and biotic collapses that mark the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, are poorly resolved despite extensive previous work. Here, we help to resolve this by describing a rapidly emplaced, high-energy onshore surge deposit from the terrestrial Hell Creek Formation in Montana. Associated ejecta and a cap of iridium-rich impactite reveal that its emplacement coincided with the Chicxulub event. Acipenseriform fish, densely packed in the deposit, contain ejecta spherules in their gills and were buried by an inland-directed surge that inundated a deeply incised river channel before accretion of the fine-grained impactite. Although this deposit displays all of the physical characteristics of a tsunami runup, the timing (<1 hour postimpact) is instead consistent with the arrival of strong seismic waves from the magnitude Mw ∼10 to 11 earthquake generated by the Chicxulub impact, identifying a seismically coupled seiche inundation as the likely cause. Our findings present high-resolution chronology of the immediate aftereffects of the Chicxulub impact event in the Western Interior, and report an impact-triggered onshore mix of marine and terrestrial sedimentation—potentially a significant advancement for eventually resolving both the complex dynamics of debris ejection and the full nature and extent of biotic disruptions that took place in the first moments postimpact.
Our ancestors at the time were small shrew-like creatures. The extinction event occurred in several phases. The immediate impact directly devastated the local region and created a mega-tsunami that spread yet more destruction. It also kicked up a huge amount of debris which then re-entered Earth's atmosphere around the world over the course of the next roughly hour or so. This would have heated most of the atmosphere to the temperature of an oven, sparking massive wildfires and killing off most land animals. The ash and other crud injected into the stratosphere (such as sulfur dioxide) would have stuck around for several years and reduced the effective insolation at the Earth's surface substantially, causing massive die-off of plants and a contraction of primary productivity (biomass creation) across the globe (effectively a "great depression" in the food web).
Many aquatic animals would have been able to survive the initial effects but would have been put in quite a pinch by the reduction in food that set in after. As mentioned, large land animals on the surface would have been mostly wiped out pretty quick, many of the rest would have starved as the one two punch of massive fires and reduced sunlight (and possibly global cooling) would have produced. Small animals that lived or took refuge underground (or perhaps were aquatic or semi-aquatic) could have survived the initial effects in large numbers and though they would have diminished in population in the hard times afterward could have eked through.
Scrappy little omnivores and/or scavengers would have been well suited to ride the waves of chaotic changes following the mass extinction.
> Finally, he showed me a photograph of a fossil jawbone; it belonged to the mammal he’d found in the burrow. “This is the jaw of Dougie,” he said. The bone was big for a Cretaceous mammal—three inches long—and almost complete, with a tooth
The mammal mentioned in the article was a marsupial, so not in our ancestral line. Marsupials have split from the eutherians (to which we belong) long before the C-T boundary. At C-T there were already early primates, which is our closer family.
A fascinating story about this is in Baxter's "Evolution" book which starts with a little primate at the CT boundary and traces the history of the family to modern humans.
Sort of. The lineage that became birds had already split off from the lineages we typically think of as “dinosaur” in the popular consciousness, quite a long time before the KT event. Nothing like the dinosaur toys you played with as a kid survived. (But then, many of the ones you played with as a kid were probably from 50-100M years earlier anyway, with the notable exception of T-Rex).
They basically inherited the largest amount of smoked and ash/earth baked chicken (dinosaur) and when that was done, they ate one another until the light and the plants came back.
tl;dr's aside, this is a fantastic article and should be read in it's entirety.
I must say, "formidable paleontologist" Jack Horner comes off as a royal a-hole:
"But, when I asked Horner about DePalma recently, he said at first that he didn’t remember him: “In the community, we don’t get to know students very well.”"
This article is written by Douglas Preston - a co-author of the bestseller Pendergast series and several other fiction and non-fiction novels. Took me by surprise when I saw the name.
You get the feeling that Robert DePalma might be the Andrew Wiles of paleontology. It's kind of rare when you read something in plain sight - in the New Yorker - and you recognize it should be much, much bigger news than it is.
I'll stop here, but this is a bit of an avocation of mine, and this is unthinkably amazing. To think something like this existed... I almost think there has to be catch, because it's too good to be true.
"He planned to remove the entire burrow intact, in a block, and run it through a CT scanner back home, to see what it contained. “Any Cretaceous mammal burrow is incredibly rare,” he said. “But this one is impossible—it’s dug right through the KT boundary.” Perhaps, he said, the mammal survived the impact and the flood, burrowed into the mud to escape the freezing darkness, then died. “It may have been born in the Cretaceous and died in the Paleocene,” he said. “And to think—sixty-six million years later, a stinky monkey is digging it up, trying to figure out what happened.” He added, “If it’s a new species, I’ll name it after you.”"
and
"The block told the story of the impact in microcosm. “It was a very bad day,” DePalma said. “Look at these two fish.” He showed me where the sturgeon’s scutes—the sharp, bony plates on its back—had been forced into the body of the paddlefish. One fish was impaled on the other. The mouth of the paddlefish was agape, and jammed into its gill rakers were microtektites—sucked in by the fish as it tried to breathe. DePalma said, “This fish was likely alive for some time after being caught in the wave, long enough to gasp frenzied mouthfuls of water in a vain attempt to survive.”"
That's the mind blowing thing about fossils. The chances of one forming are one in millions... but there have been so many living organisms on Earth that finding them turns out to be pretty trivial. One of my most mind blowing memories as a child involves tripping on a rock in my grandparents' yard, pulling it out, and revealing on its surface the perfect carbon imprint of some fern-like looking plant.
And then we have the one in a million chance of finding the one in a million site, which leads to what the article describes. Pretty awesome.
I see a lot of expression of scepticism, echo-chamber style, but not much ‘reason’.
The central attack seems to be a straw-man; that it’s not a dinosaur graveyard, something that was never claimed in the article at all. It’s like they read the title, and jumped on Twitter without reading the whole article.
That the first paper doesn't talk about dinosaurs is reason for skepticism? He didn't tell us everything in the first paper, therefore it's probably bullshit?
I didn't say that. But that link I provided was a working paleontologist, so I figured his skepticism was worth noting. I couldn't tell you if it's bullshit or not, as a non-expert in the field.
While I do find this fascinating (if it holds up), there is so much prior evidence for the impact, and for its devastating consequences globally, that this is unlikely to change the course of paleontology.
1. It settles a question of whether the dinosaurs were already gone.
2. It let's us know what time of year the impact was.
3. We are literally seeing everything in that ecosystem. It is very, very rare to get a fossil record that shows us a whole ecosystem. (The best known example of mass fossils, tar pits, are very heavily biased towards scavengers. Mudslides will preserve a complete ecosystem, but usually not with the same quantity and quality as this one.)
4. For species after species you have complete preservation. Including soft tissue, body shape, skin, and so on.
5. He found tektites in amber. That is, we have pieces of the meteorite preserved in a substance that would preserve their chemical makeup. Once analyzed this will give us direct information about the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs that we could not have received any other way. For example we could learn whether it was a comet from the Oort cloud versus an asteroid from the inner solar system.
6. The quality of preservation is such that we not only can identify dinosaur feathers, we can identify where on the body those specific feathers came from.
7. The quality of soft tissue preservation is such that we can identify the diet that some of the animals ate.
8. The fact that the ammonite shell was initially pink upon being excavated suggests that we may be able to learn about the color of some of these things. Evidence of color is very hard to come by.
If the story holds up, this site is important for a lot of reasons beyond adding to the evidence for a meteorite wiping out the dinosaurs. And if this is a partial list that is obvious now, I am sure that the list will get much, much longer.
