> introduced her to DePalma, at the time a graduate student at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. DePalma holds the lease to the Tanis site, which sits on private land, and controls access to it.
How does a grad student hold the lease to a famed fossil site? There is more to this story.
Apparently there is a "long-standing practice in paleontology" for researchers to pay private landowners for (exclusive) access to search for fossils on their private property - at least according to this New Yorker article [1] - and that DePalma arranged for that to further his research.
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.)
For reference, DePalma (the accused) was featured in a New Yorker article in 2019 [1] that was shared and discussed here on HN at the time [2].
(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".)
There are lots of kinds of evidence. I was thinking more like evidence of how the data was handled, who knew what when etc.
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".
The discovery is amazing no matter who gets credit for the first paper, but if DePalma faked the data for the paper that is really disappointing. He got all the media coverage with that New Yorker piece and interviews in the BBC documentary, possibly by being first and the most media savvy.
I'd call it more than "disappointing", that would be fraud if true. And let's not forget how disgusting it would be stealing the fame from a young Ph.D. candidate for whom this could have been the kickstarting of a successful career.
>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.
If it turns out it was faked what are the possible consequences for Robert DePalma?
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?
I had read it, and seeing your reply, read it again, but still see no mention of any impact this would have on DePalma's future if it is determined that the data was faked so that he could take credit.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
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.
It doesn't matter because if the article is correct, it's on him to produce the raw data, there is no need to speculate. As it is, the story is fishy in every sense of the word and definitely warrants an investigation.
Apparently he doesn't have the data anymore. According to the article, independent third parties did see the data and didn't think it was suspicious. The implication of what you are saying is that if you lose data for any reason then you're automatically guilty of data forgery. Obviously that's not a great precedent to set.
It's a recently published paper, barely a few months old. Conveniently when questioned he claimed the analysis had been done years ago by someone who's now dead and the raw data is lost. I don't know about yourself but I have copies of all the raw data for everything I ever published, simply because that's the sort of stuff a researcher would naturally keep. Of course, the story could theoretically have happened as he says but it's quite the coincidence that this specific data set is now found to be irrecoverably lost after he's accused of fraud.
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.
You've conveniently omitted the independent third-parties that had seen the data. It's a messy world. Unexpected things happen. How do these third-parties factor in to Occam's razor? You need to add more parameters to your explanation as to why the third-parties would verify the existence of non-existent data.
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?
You mean the sort of third parties that let a paper slip through the cracks which peers contacted by Science.org claim should have never been published because of the glaring errors it contains?
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.
I suspect that you either did not read the article posted here or that you are ignoring relevant parts of it when you reply in this thread for reasons known only to yourself. Perhaps you should state your relationship to During and DePalma so others can judge whether there is a conflict of interest here.
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.
I never thought I'd live to see the day Academia would deliver UFC levels of spectacle, yet here I am after reading through countless threads of deep scientific knowledge I cannot begin to grasp, fuming with interconnected comment sections of high-end trash-talking [0].
You're not very familiar with science then, what you see on HN is just the tip of the iceberg.
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.
You had me in the first half, but your conclusion confuses me. This UFC level of response is what happens when other researchers smell blood in the water. It's the exact opposite of blind belief.
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.
I worded that confusingly, what was meant is the general public's perception of the academic world, not researchers themselves. We're in complete agreement about the reaction and in my opinion it's an appropriate one. If this guy made up the data he needs to go down.
Maybe blind trust in science is the wrong way to phrase it. People tend to blindly believe and click on whatever validates their own beliefs without caring about the reality of scientific consensus. There's always an endless parade of news articles with "study finds" or "scientists say" with zero context.
"Blind trust in science" is the wrong way to phrase it, which is exactly the problem, because people do it anyway. The popular meme is to "go with the science", regardless of the fact that that's barely definable.
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.
Science is one step backwards for every two steps forward. Scientific consensus is often overturned once we get more facts and once we get more research done.
“I love SCIENCE!” types don't get how important are general and specific fashions.
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.
I read this article and got curious so I went to reddit looking for any sign of it on /r/paleontology. I figured there would surely be someone in the field commenting about it since it is a really big deal to fee like you need to call out a colleague in such a public manner.
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.
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 think your [2] is actually defending DePalma, or at least refuting a particular objection to Dakotaraptor, which appears to be one of his finds. Am I reading it wrong?
I agree that link [2] is defending his (DePalma's) taxonomic placement of Dakotaraptor or possibly making the case that it is not out of the question based on comparisons that can be made.
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.
I wonder what proportion of “failures” in science are because of the human factor. By that I don’t mean our ability to make technical or logical mistakes, but our personality, greed, vanity, etc.
> 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.
Possibly relevant: DePalma published in Scientific Reports (which is hosted on nature.com but is controversial [1]) while During's paper actually got published in Nature.
50 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadHow 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)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanis_(fossil_site)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Forrest
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.
(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...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19526679
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.
[1]: https://www.paleonerds.com/podcast/robertdepalma
[2]: https://www.paleonerds.com/podcast/robertdepalma2
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?
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
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.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33898789
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.
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.
> 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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports