Paleontologist accused of faking data in dino-killing asteroid paper
science.org
science.org
(For those that didn't read this article, DePalma is accused of faking the data to match earlier findings w/ another peer to "beat her to the punch," but the initial data and the drawn conclusions are apparently still "valid".)
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-di...
Ed: more to the point, if the evidence we have today is all we ever get, it's simply not enough to prove fraud, so it's very premature to start saying past comments "haven't aged well".
>Several independent scientists consulted about the case by Science agreed the Scientific Reports paper contains suspicious irregularities, and most were surprised that the paper—which they note contains typos, unresolved proofreader’s notes, and several basic notation errors—was published in the first place. Although they stopped short of saying the irregularities clearly point to fraud, most—but not all—said they are so concerning that DePalma’s team must come up with the raw data behind its analyses if team members want to clear themselves.
Sadly this "surprised it got published" story is all too common. There's a real issue with quantity over quality in science publishing.
In a thread about another Hell Creek dinosaur that may turn out to be a chimera fossil instead of a distinct species [0] I found this Twitter thread from someone familiar with DePalma [1]. Seems like more than one person suspects that DePalma may not be on the level [2], [3] or that his work may not stand up to close scrutiny.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Paleontology/comments/zfj0ll/sad_an...
[1] https://twitter.com/paleopaws/status/1600520038070587395
[2] https://thesauropodomorphlair.wordpress.com/2019/09/28/nukin...
[3] https://twitter.com/TomHoltzPaleo/status/1600577537868181504
Pretty interesting. I'm pretty sure I watched a movie about this discovery detailing how they narrowed the season of the asteroid strike down to spring and it was an informative movie and entertaining too. Anyway, we get to see how this all shakes out.
I am not a dinosaur expert at all so I don't know how one goes about assigning specimens to species and placing them on the family trees. There are lots of challenges to the process in identifying adult versus juvenile individuals that lend enough confusion that I have to let others make those calls.
I believe the criticism that the author is rebutting in the post has partly been handled by DePalma, namely that part of the material used to define the Dakotaraptor was actually chimeric in that it did not come from the same animal. That seems likely since other posts I read mentioned that the Dakotaraptor fossil was co-mingled with other fossils and DePalma later removed the questionable material (from a turtle?) to correct that problem.
The author of the post did not address the other issues noted about DePalma and how he approaches his work and manages his relationships with peers. Those characteristics are discussed on the other threads of the other links and mentioned in the original article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Personality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hooke#Personality_and_d...
What astounds me again and again is the level of cult and blind belief in academia we've reached in parts of the world. It's almost like science has taken the role of religious dogma for many self-proclaimed atheists. Including holy (twitter) wars, schisms and the sacrifice of scapegoats.
Similar but less interested to people outside of the field in question quarrels occur when fellow researchers find a crack somewhere in what's been published, or even more excitingly, widely accepted.
BTW it's really clear in cases where the "science" result is orthogonal to their existing beliefs: did "pro-maskers" have opinions about masks[0] in 2019? Mostly no. Now think about, say, astronomy results. Lots of people will just go with it, whatever it is, if it has a convincing "science" label on it.
[0] DON'T PANIC, I think masks are fine.
Here we have a superstar topic, an asteroid killing dinosaurs. It would be fine if it was simply famous, but many consider it One True Measure for everything to align with. So when people present some old or some new data, and say that they are sufficiently confident that their methods are precise and well-adjusted enough to show that X happened before the impact, or that Y happened long after the impact, they are simply dismissed, or told to invent a better explanation that respects the impact as a source of creation of everything, or told that something might be wrong with the method (which effectively means their whole field has been producing nonsensical garbage all along). Moreover, after a decade or two there comes a generation that naively believes that it's their duty to defend the holy principles, and shame the heretics. And then there's internet know-it-alls shouting something about Occam's razor.
One would think that years-long volcanic winter would be disastrous no matter which season it happened. However, the desire to touch the superstar yourself could lead to risky behavior.
Either you are able to provide the means to have someone independently verify something or you aren't. It should end there.
How does a grad student hold the lease to a famed fossil site? There is more to this story.
It seems that after the initial promising findings, DePalma put together (with the help of investors or benefactors?) the money for an exclusive long-term lease.
> He found many complete fish, which are rare in the Hell Creek Formation, and he figured that he could remove them intact if he worked with painstaking care. He agreed to pay the rancher a certain amount for each season that he worked there. (The specifics of the arrangement, as is standard practice in paleontology, are a closely guarded secret. The site is now under exclusive long-term lease.)
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-di...
It's probable he applied for and gained a lease to dig from the land owner as far back as 2012 when he first started to dig there [1].
One might as well ask "How does a Grad Student own a billion dollar mining operation and invest in expanding global green hydrogen production?" [2]
(Although to be fair he ceased to be a "grad student" in 2019 when his Doctorate was conferred)
He likely bought it before it was famed. Southwest ND is almost all badlands and thus very cheap. Like under a thousand dollars per acre cheap.
> He did send Science a document containing what he says are McKinney’s data. It features what appear to be scanned printouts of manually typed tables containing the isotopic data from the fish fossils. These tables are not the same as raw data produced by the mass spectrometer named in the paper’s methods section, but DePalma noted the data’s credibility had been verified by two outside researchers...
This sounds consistent with honest mistakes on all sides. DePalma and/or Curtis most likely made mistakes transcribing and processing the data; if they were collaborating, DePalma would have implicitly trusted Curtis to be giving him good data, even if he genuinely didn't know where the isotope analysis happened. I don't buy the claim that there "must" have been a digital record of the isotope analysis: we'd all like to live in that world, but I get the impression that a lot of labs work on, shall we say, a less formal basis. And it's really easy to lose track of where an idea came from; both parties could honestly believe it was theirs.
The main thing that's still suspicious is where it seems DePalma must have known During was working on something very similar to him/his team, and didn't tell her. That's a bit of a dick move, to say the least, even if it was just negligence. He should have been looking out for something like that.
We should also hold open the possibility that Curtis was making stuff up, and DePalma and During are caught in his mess. Not especially likely, but as long as we're throwing around fraud accusations, let's be thorough.
It'd be nice to think that something like this would ruin your career and you'd never be able to work in your field again, but realistically does anything happen to people who are caught falsifying data?
Without conclusive evidence, it’s irresponsible to get out the pitchforks.
According to During, DePalma was supposed to be an author on the paper. According DePalma, they had brief discussions to collaborate, but ultimately decided not to.
Simply using Occam's razor in the absence of better evidence. Which is on those making the claim to produce, you can't just publish papers and then go "I've done the isotopic analyses, trust me bro". Researchers could make up anything then, there needs to be accountability. At the very least his team needs to retract the paper.
Here's another possibility: During goes to DePalma to collaborate and asks if DePalma still has the data. DePalma says he doesn't. During sees this an an opportunity to claim credit for the work.
It's impossible to tell which scenario is more likely. Are you really willing to ruin someone's career over purely circumstantial evidence provided by a biased witness?
What evidence do you have that anyone has actually looked into those data? In what context? You're simply repeating his claim but there isn't evidence the data was ever scrutinized. In research you're shown other people's data all the time - that doesn't mean that people actually look into it.
In a reply further down you pose this scenario, though the evidence against it is covered in the story that it appears you didn't read.
>Here's another possibility: During goes to DePalma to collaborate and asks if DePalma still has the data. DePalma says he doesn't. During sees this an an opportunity to claim credit for the work.
From the article it is clear that she used her own data from samples that she collected (she is credited in DePalma's acknowledgements) and that he shipped to her so that she could study them and she attempted to get him to be a co-author on her paper but he declined and instead, he assembled a paper that to reviewers looked to be a bit haphazardly assembled.
From the article - DePalma's paper:
>Several independent scientists consulted about the case by Science agreed the Scientific Reports paper contains suspicious irregularities, and most were surprised that the paper—which they note contains typos, unresolved proofreader’s notes, and several basic notation errors—was published in the first place. Although they stopped short of saying the irregularities clearly point to fraud, most—but not all—said they are so concerning that DePalma’s team must come up with the raw data behind its analyses if team members want to clear themselves.
From the article - During's work:
>After she returned to Amsterdam, During asked DePalma to send her the samples she had dug up, mostly sturgeon fossils. He did so, and later also sent a partial paddlefish fossil he had excavated himself. During obtained extremely high-resolution x-ray images of the fossils at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France. The x-rays revealed tiny bits of glass called spherules—remnants of the shower of molten rock that would have been thrown from the impact site and rained down around the world.
It is reasonable to conclude from the text that During collected samples, had them independently analyzed, and that her analyses resulted in the discovery of the spherules lodged in the gills that helped cement this site as contemporaneous with the Chicxulub impact. The 2019 paper that DePalma and others, including Melanie During's mentor, Jan Smit co-authored with him became the basis for the movie narrated by David Attenborough. It put him in the spotlight, which appears from the various posts available on Twitter and Reddit to be something that feeds his needs.
As to others wondering how as a grad student he could come to control access to the site it is worth noting that one of the people he thanks in his acknowledgements is his Dad who is an orthodontist and who, it may be implied, could be the source for the funding needed to secure access to the Tanis site.
If it was my kid and they were needing to buy something to help them complete their studies then my wallet would open. I expect his Dad feels the same way.
I do not know either of these people and strongly suspect that in the end, we will all know more about them than we ever wanted to know.
I am glad that they were able to gather the samples, complete the analyses, compile the supporting data from multiple lines of inquiry to bolster the case for Tanis being contemporaneous with Chicxulub. I'm a geophysicist who likes geosciences.