“..like finding the Holy Grail...”

March 29, 2019 8:39 AM

“...clutched in the bony fingers of Jimmy Hoffa, sitting on top of the Lost Ark.” SLNewYorkerMag
posted by ersatzkat (38 comments total)

The sentence right before that one is even better

It is almost beyond credibility that a precise geological transcript of the most important sixty minutes of Earth’s history could still exist millions of years later—a sort of high-speed, high-­resolution video of the event recorded in fine layers of stone.

I fear the thin post has people not reading the story, so I'll summarize. A fossil hunter / paleontologist has found a bunch of fossils from the KT extinction event. Not "the ten thousand years around the time of the dinosaur extinction". But fossils showing raining glass, and a massive flood, and dinosaurs dying while doing normal dinosaur things like hunting each other. From the exact moment.

Or maybe not; there's some contention on the scholarship. Paleontology is a particularly weird science because there's profit involved in fossils.
posted by Nelson at 10:11 AM on March 29, 2019 [17 favorites]

It's a fascinating article. I feel for the academics who are clearly thinking: "This is too good to be true, especially discovered by someone without a PhD." But it's all about finding the right spot, and then collecting evidence that is convincing. The paper hasn't even been published yet, but based on the co-authors, it seems like this could be real.
posted by rikschell at 10:22 AM on March 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

It’s a long article with a lot to digest, but wow. Well worth reading if anyone’s scanning the comments before diving in. What a ride!

If DePalma’s interpretations are correct — and this article is well written and presents a fairly detailed case — this would be one of the greatest scientific discoveries of our lifetimes, certainly the greatest in paleontology.

My only complaint is this being widely published before peer review, which is imminent. The article goes into this a little, but I’m wondering what would have been lost by waiting a couple months. Is it that the world of paleontology is so cutthroat and sensational that if you’re an upstart you need to get your story out there in the popular media before you’re shot down by the establishment? Or maybe because DePalma was careless and got shot down once before?

Regardless, even if some of the nuances aren’t exactly right, this was a great read, thanks for the post.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 10:24 AM on March 29, 2019 [6 favorites]

This is one of the most clear explanations of the Chicxulub meteor impact, detailed and interesting. Geologists are all that. Love the big boy boots!
posted by Oyéah at 10:30 AM on March 29, 2019

Wow, what a site! Hope it is everything DePalma thinks it is.
posted by Gwynarra at 10:57 AM on March 29, 2019

Fascinating, fascinating. I hope it pans out the way it's described.
posted by penduluum at 10:59 AM on March 29, 2019

fascinating read!! I look forward to hearing more of this story!
posted by supermedusa at 11:10 AM on March 29, 2019

Aside from the paleontology, it's worth reading just for the description of the asteroid impact.

I read somewhere that had the asteroid hit just a few minutes later, the effect on the Earth would not have been nearly so large. Because it hit when it did, it hit a) on land, and b) at a location where the composition of the crust led to the formation of incredible amounts of acid rain. If the earth had been allowed to turn just a little longer, the asteroid would have hit the ocean -- still impactful, but possibly not so life-threatening to so many species.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 11:28 AM on March 29, 2019 [3 favorites]

I'll have to read the full article later, but given there would have been a ton of ash raining down and not a lot of predators left afterwards, it certainly seems possible that if you got lucky you could find a good record, some of the finest and most delicate fossil traces have been found in volcanic ash layers.
posted by tavella at 11:54 AM on March 29, 2019

The days of skulduggery in paleontology

I see what he did there...
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:14 PM on March 29, 2019 [8 favorites]

That's right up there with finding the first exoplanet. Wow!
posted by BeeDo at 12:16 PM on March 29, 2019

What an amazing article.

His family ­buried their dead pets in one spot and put the burial markers in another, so that he wouldn’t dig up the corpses; he found them anyway.

🙀
posted by exogenous at 1:49 PM on March 29, 2019 [3 favorites]

On the one hand, he sounds exactly like a crank - huge claims, works mostly alone, secretive, started but hasn't finished the usual educational path, irritated with the scholarly establishment for a perceived slight (Dakotaraptor and the turtle bones). On the other hand, apparently Walter Alvarez is a coauthor on his paper, so maybe?
posted by echo target at 2:09 PM on March 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

I really hopes this is right, because humanity's understanding of the most important single Earthly event of the last half a billion years or so (i.e. since vertebrate animals starting hanging out on land) will grow by leaps and bounds.

What an absurd find.
posted by Kattullus at 2:09 PM on March 29, 2019

I really wish that this article had been held and finalized after the paper appeared.

PNAS is a high-impact journal, right? So it seems likely that there's something there.

In re Paleobond: Another thing to like about field sciences in general is the prevalence of small manufacturers of interesting substances and small machines. None of these things is really salable at scale (like test tubes or something), so they don't get gobbled up by big corporations, and half the time if you order something you're talking to, like, the person who developed it. Or actually, you can call up to order something and discover that everyone is out in the field and you're SOL until they get back.

This is so exciting! I will look out for the paper.
posted by Frowner at 2:26 PM on March 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

Alvarez is a geologist rather than a paleontologist, and Preston's a journalist, so a certain amount of wariness until peer review by qualified paleontologists, but unless Preston is totally making up shit DePalma has at least found an extraordinary site since Preston watched him working and finding fossils by the dozens. And tekites, which suggests that it was not an ordinary flash flood.
posted by tavella at 2:45 PM on March 29, 2019 [6 favorites]

Wow this is fantastic and close to home — I'm originally from near Bowman, ND and spent some time volunteering on digs.
posted by nathan_teske at 4:52 PM on March 29, 2019

CheeseDigestsAll: Aside from the paleontology, it's worth reading just for the description of the asteroid impact.

Yeah, no kidding! I guess I never really thought that hard about what the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs was really like. For some reason, I thought it was a much more slow-moving thing, something like increased volcanic activity causing a change in the climate only... more so. I didn't realize the scale of the impact caused lava (well, super-heated rock) to rain down over the entire Western Hemisphere, set off world-wide forest fires, fucked up the entire Earth's chemistry with vaporized limestone and sulfur, and also shot debris up into space some of which might be on the moons of Jupiter right now.
posted by mhum at 6:52 PM on March 29, 2019

The PNAS paper is out, at least to journalists -- the New York Times story is mostly about the paper, with reference to the New Yorker story. Apparently the paper doesn't deal with the mentioned dinosaur remains, sadly. But does cover the tekites buried in plant and fish remains. I found the tekites in amber particularly resonant -- pitch running from a dying, burning tree, and tiny bits of the asteroid strike that killed it raining down on its remains.
posted by tavella at 7:22 PM on March 29, 2019 [3 favorites]

pitch running from a dying, burning tree, and tiny bits of the asteroid strike that killed it raining down on its remains.

That image will rival the opening scenes of Up when it inevitably features in a Pixar movie one of these days.
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:52 PM on March 29, 2019

"I didn't realize the scale of the impact caused lava (well, super-heated rock) to rain down over the entire Western Hemisphere, set off world-wide forest fires, fucked up the entire Earth's chemistry with vaporized limestone and sulfur, and also shot debris up into space some of which might be on the moons of Jupiter right now."

I don't know why it didn't occur to me that asteroid strikes on Earth could fling bits of Earth to other planets; I OWN a teeny 3 mm bit of Mars that landed on Earth from exactly the same mechanism! (It's in my china cabinet, obvs)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:58 PM on March 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

Fascinating read thank you very much ersatzkat! I hope DePalma is right!
posted by Meatbomb at 2:31 AM on March 30, 2019

At first glance, the article's top image appears to show De Palma cosplaying as Dr. Alan Grant from Jurassic Park. Upon closer inspection, that's totally what it is! He's even wearing a raptor claw necklace!
posted by Enkidude at 4:01 AM on March 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I can see why stuff like that and playing the Indiana Jones theme in the car might make experts in the field take him less than seriously.
posted by rikschell at 5:21 AM on March 30, 2019

The bit towards the end of TFA about the timing being an issue doesn’t really hold together. Firstly it says:

The KT tsunami, even moving at more than a hundred miles an hour, would have taken many hours to travel the two thousand miles to the site.

Fair enough, but tsunamis propagate at up to 600mph [cite], depending on the depth of the water and the topography of the sea floor. So the wave could have arrived in 3 hours - presumably we have some knowledge of the shape of the intervening body of water, so perhaps they modelled it properly but you’d think that would rate a mention.
Then:

The rainfall of glass blobs, however, would have hit the area and stopped within about an hour after the impact.

I know this has been modelled (per the article), but it seems strange that a plume of rock stretching half way to the moon would all fall out within an hour - that involves travelling half a million kilometres round trip in 4000 seconds, for an average velocity of 100km/s which is well above escape velocity/the velocity reached falling to Earth from infinity. Plus this would have been the mother of all tektite storms - even the very trailing edge might account for quite a bit of material.
I’m not saying the timing does make sense, but the case for it not doing so seems poorly articulated.
posted by memetoclast at 5:45 AM on March 30, 2019 [3 favorites]

That was a fascinating article (and the New York Times article is worth reading too). The photographs are really extraordinary--sixty-five million years later, it still looks like a scene of awful carnage. I have so many questions after reading that. There's the question of the speed at which the tsunami would have propagated, as memetoclast notes above (would that depend at all on the amount of energy released by the impact, which I gather was far greater than from any ordinary earthquake?). But I also wonder about the distance this tsunami would've had to travel: it's entirely possible that I misunderstand plate tectonics, but the map in the NYT article confuses me. It shows a modern map of the world, with the locations of the Chicxulub crater, the fossil site in North Dakota, and the Western Interior Seaway, as the boundaries of that body of water would have looked at the time. But I would think that this map doesn't tell us much, since the distance between the modern-day site of the crater and the fossil bed does not correspond to the distance that would've existed between them at the time of the impact.

And then a totally different matter, concerning how paleontologists make discoveries like this. Obviously, a great deal of expert knowledge is needed to pick out the likely locations of fossil deposits and to be able to date them, but it seems like DePalma stumbled on to this site by luck. How many wondrous discoveries must have been made by indifferent miners or cranks looking for proof of Noah's flood...
posted by a certain Sysoi Pafnut'evich at 11:50 AM on March 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

...since the distance between the modern-day site of the crater and the fossil bed does not correspond to the distance that would've existed between them at the time of the impact.

Here's a map of the late Cretaceous world, which (assuming it's more or less correct) indicates that today's North America hasn't moved much in the intervening time, so using a modern map wouldn't be meaningfully far off for the purposes of this article.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:05 PM on March 30, 2019 [2 favorites]

Fantastic article!

Regarding the unavailable PNAS article: in the comments section of this Gizmodo article, the author reveals that DePalma specifically requested permission for journalists' articles to come out before the publication date, and speculates that DePalma didn't want everything thinking that his entire paper was an April 1st joke. I can understand the concern.

Well, tomorrow the paper will come out, and we'll see if it's a joke. I think not.
posted by brambleboy at 9:45 PM on March 31, 2019 [1 favorite]

These fossils may capture the day the dinosaurs died. Here's what you should know. Reports about a stunning site in North Dakota are making waves among paleontologists, who are eager to see more. (National Geographic)

The paper in question: A seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the KPg boundary, North Dakota. (PNAS published ahead of print April 1, 2019; open article) Round-up of early responses from the scientific community: Astonishment, skepticism greet fossils claimed to record dinosaur-killing asteroid impact. (Science Magazine)

More from Science Mag:

A fossil site in North Dakota records a stunningly detailed picture of the devastation minutes after an asteroid slammed into Earth about 66 million years ago, a group of paleontologists argue in a paper due out this week. Geologists have theorized that the impact, near what is now the town of Chicxulub on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, played a role in the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, when all the dinosaurs (except birds) and much other life on Earth vanished.

If the team, led by Robert DePalma, a graduate student in paleontology at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, is correct, it has uncovered a record of apocalyptic destruction 3000 kilometers from Chicxulub. At the site, called Tanis, the researchers say they have discovered the chaotic debris left when tsunamilike waves surged up a river valley. Trapped in the debris is a jumbled mess of fossils, including freshwater sturgeon that apparently choked to death on glassy particles raining out of the sky from the fireball lofted by the impact.

“That’s the first ever evidence of the interaction between life on the last day of the Cretaceous and the impact event,” says team member Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. The deposit may also provide some of the strongest evidence yet that nonbird dinosaurs were still thriving on impact day.

“Outcrops like [this] are the reasons many of us are drawn to geology,” says David Kring, a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, who wasn’t a member of the research team. “Those few meters of rock record the wrath of the Chicxulub impact and the devastation it caused.” But not everyone has fully embraced the find, perhaps in part because it was first announced to the world last week in an article in The New Yorker. The paper, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), does not include all the scientific claims mentioned in The New Yorker story, including that numerous dinosaurs as well as fish were buried at the site.

“I hope this is all legit—I’m just not 100% convinced yet,” says Thomas Tobin, a geologist at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Tobin says the PNAS paper is densely packed with detail from paleontology, sedimentology, geochemistry, and more. “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.

Seems like something we'll be reading about more in the coming months, either "holy cow, this is real," or "good try, but you're assumptions are questionable."
posted by filthy light thief at 9:05 AM on April 2, 2019 [2 favorites]

So, there are some really fucking fascinating comments on a Facebook meme page, from a grad student at KU who worked on the site. If you read the Science article filthy light thief linked, there was a quote:

"Manning confirms rumors that the study was initially submitted to a journal with a higher impact factor before it was accepted at PNAS. 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. “After a while, we decided it wasn’t a good route to go down,” he says. The paper cleared peer review at PNAS within about 4 months."

Well, at least according to this student, it was Kirk Johnson who was derailing it.

"Well the sad thing is that because of salty people who have connections, this paper has been delayed for over 2 years - all because a certain guy who used to work in the area had never found anything NEARLY as amazing, so his jealously led him to use his connections to get it rejected from other journals. He even called some of the co-authors and tried to convince them to leave the paper. You laugh, but it's sad when this sort of "smack-talking" causes damage to a good man's career."

"Kirk Johnson is just being a jerk because he worked in that area for years without finding anything nearly as amazing. In fact, he is the reason this paper has been getting blocked for the past 2 years."

Kirk Johnson is, for those unaware, the director of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, so certainly the kind of heavyweight who can cause you a lot of grief if you are trying to publish in paleontology. Now, he may have very good reasons for his critique... but if this is true, it's really inappropriate that he is being quoted in coverage as some kind of neutral observer, his comments should be placed in context of his active opposition to the paper.

Now, the student's interpretation of his actions is possibly unfair, but I gotta say, I wouldn't exactly find it unusual in the academic world for a senior scientist who likes to to position himself as a 'rock star' and has a TV career, to be extremely hostile to someone who has stumbled across a star-making site of their own. I am somewhat reminded of the controversy over Rising Star cave, where one of the loudest voices criticizing the coverage and the quick publication was a scientist who had refused to release his first paper describing a critical human fossil for something like 20+ years, which meant that other scientists couldn't publish until he did. When you have made your entire career on a shoebox-worth of fossils, someone who has an entire stack of complete skeletons and is happy to hand out complete 3-D scans of them to anyone can look like a hell of a threat.

But then again, there are definitely some things to be wary about in DePalma's approach. Hopefully further followup research will settle the matter.
posted by tavella at 5:02 PM on April 2, 2019 [4 favorites]

This is fascinating. I'm looking forward to the followup research.

As an addendum to all this, I just wanted to add that I've read Lost City of the Monkey God, which Preston (the author of the New Yorker piece) wrote. It was fascinating and well-written, but the ending started to feel a little over-blown and sensationalized to me. I'm not sure that's worth anything, but I'm trying to analyze everything about this cautiously because I am very excited and intrigued by this discovery and I want it to be what the article says it is.
posted by nubs at 1:52 PM on April 3, 2019 [2 favorites]

I've read Lost City of the Monkey God, which Preston (the author of the New Yorker piece) wrote.

Nubs, thanks for drawing that connection. I feel the same way: this is a really satisfying confirmation, if true, and a wonderful trove of fossils in any event, but the author's style makes me less than confident. Still, there are other reports and at least one peer-reviewed paper, so it's not like we're forced to take everything he says uncritically.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:46 PM on April 3, 2019

"It's time for the heroic male paleontologist trope to go extinct. The New Yorker's story on the day the dinosaurs died brings up more questions than it answers, but it does make the staleness of this genre clear." An article on Slate by natural history author Riley Black.
posted by biogeo at 4:29 PM on April 3, 2019 [2 favorites]

The original commercial discoverers of the site have released a statement detailing the initial discovery and how they handed it off to DePalma (they recognized it was important, but didn't have the time/expertise to do the site justice), and one of the things it mentions is that they took two large castings which are now in the hands of Chicago's Field Museum, and the Field is now examining its castings w/r/t DePalma's claims. (One of their postdoc paleontology fellows posted "Turns out the @FieldMuseum has a block of the now infamous Tanis site, with this paddlefish and sturgeon from the end Cretaceous. Time to look for pieces of Mexico!") Apparently the head of paleontology at the Field (Lance Grande) published something about the site/fossils around 2012, but I don't really know how to look for paleontology papers. :) (DePalma chose NOT to site Grande in his paper.)

So this makes me a tiny bit more confident in DePalma's claims, in that the Field thinks they're plausible enough to spend staff hours looking at them, and feel a lot better that there are two large castings already at the Field Museum so not everything is solely under DePalma's control.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:01 AM on April 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

Thanks for that update, Eyebrows. It does make me feel a little better, although it's interesting to note the discrepancies between how the New Yorker piece describes the handoff of the site vs. DePalma's (according to the New Yorker, the commercial finders didn't see the value).

Sigh. I guess the fact that there is a bit of a fight/disagreement about who found the site, and how it came to be DePalma's is perhaps a further indication of how important this all is.
posted by nubs at 9:23 AM on April 5, 2019

"It's time for the heroic male paleontologist trope to go extinct. The New Yorker's story on the day the dinosaurs died brings up more questions than it answers, but it does make the staleness of this genre clear."

On the one hand, I agree with this statement and the article definitely spins DePalma as a lone hero. On the other, when I read the NYer article, the depiction of DePalma struck me as more of a satire of the heroic paleontologist than anything else. Or else an on-the-nose depiction of the most difficult member of the lab. I did not come away thinking, "quick, to the PhD program - maybe it's not too late and I can go work with that guy".
posted by Frowner at 10:16 AM on April 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

I do hope they find pieces of Mexico, because while I don't see how you could fake the *site*, it would be relatively easy to fake the dating as long as you closely control the material. It's not like he's wandering around on an erosion plain where you could salt in fossils from somewhere else, or working solo and presenting found fossils, they've had big teams from KU and elsewhere ripping densely packed fossils out of rock. But I wondered a bit about the whole fly to Puerto Rico to get reference tekites to compare bit -- surely there's plenty of them floating around that could be borrowed? It certainly does open the possibility of presenting a second set of PR samples as your 'site'. But maybe they had to be fresh out of the rock to be a good comparison. Either way, having a sample from a totally different chain of custody would be a great confirmation.

Granted alternate explanations seem pretty contorted. You'd either have to have another asteroid strike close in time to K-T that was big enough to throw up lots of tekites, but small enough that the footprint hadn't been identified in an area studied for as long and intensely as Hell Creek. Or you'd have to have a tekite deposit from K-T somehow get eroded? Landslip? In such a way that fish were suddenly swimming in water laden with old tekites, and some of them also getting thrown up in the air to land in fresh sap. Which would also mean it would have to be long enough after K-T that trees had recovered, and it was my understanding that these areas were nothing but ferns for quite a long time after K-T. And also they'd have to either fit in to or replicate the well known K-T boundary pattern.

And then there's motivation -- both those potential explanations would still be career-making sites. A lagerstätte of a complete ecosystem either right before or right after the K-T line would still be an amazing discovery and definitely get you your doctorate and your name on lots of scientific papers. It just wouldn't be the sort of site where movies get made about you... but then, people have done worse things for lesser reasons.
posted by tavella at 1:13 PM on April 5, 2019

BTW, I don't think the explanations from Nicklas and the New Yorker article actually clash -- Paleo Prospectors is a commercial outfit that advertises itself as letting you hunt for dinosaurs, so when the one top level dino bone turned out to be an outlier and it was just fish fish fish, that's not what people are paying them for. I.e. t's perfectly possible that they didn't see it as having commercial value while recognizing it could have scientific value. They passed it off to a fairly random grad student who was looking for fish, they didn't bring in Top Minds, so seems unlikely they recognized it as a ground-breaking site, just interesting.
posted by tavella at 1:45 PM on April 5, 2019