New evidence about the worst day on Earth
September 5, 2024 12:07 AM Subscribe
None of what follows will make sense absent a single social fact: The field of paleontology is mean. It has always been mean. It is, in the words of Uppsala University professor Per Ahlberg, “a honeypot of narcissists.” It is “a snake pit of personality disorders.” “An especially nasty area of academia,” the Field Museum’s Jingmai O’Connor calls it. ... It would take years for the ten days During and DePalma spent together to spin into a scandal that consumed both of them. She would accuse him of research misconduct and fabricating data. He would accuse her of plagiarism and defamation. He would lose weight and have flashbacks to childhood bullies; stress would pose a risk to her first pregnancy. Disaster struck one day in the spring, they both decided in the end, and transformed everything that came after. from The Asteroid-in-Spring Hypothesis [Intelligencer; ungated]
In the same layer, known as the K-Pg Boundary, geologists would find tektites
A good place to observe how annoying it is when scientists rename a label that everyone knows just for the hell of it.
posted by rory at 12:26 AM on September 5 [5 favorites]
A good place to observe how annoying it is when scientists rename a label that everyone knows just for the hell of it.
posted by rory at 12:26 AM on September 5 [5 favorites]
Wow, the faked isotope data done at a secret location no one can remember the location of? Breathless announcements of fossil eggs and feathers that never actually show up anywhere years later? DePalma comes off as quite a dick.
I mean, that's the short version, but, wow. I hope Melanie During has a long and fruitful career; she deserves it after the crap she went through. Thanks for this fascinating story, chavenet.
posted by mediareport at 3:49 AM on September 5 [13 favorites]
I mean, that's the short version, but, wow. I hope Melanie During has a long and fruitful career; she deserves it after the crap she went through. Thanks for this fascinating story, chavenet.
posted by mediareport at 3:49 AM on September 5 [13 favorites]
Michael Price, in the magazine Science, wrote about the report from the University of Manchester last winter. It left a lot more questions than answers, and Kerry Howley’s article, that chavenet linked to, gives many answers but pulls disappointingly away from the central point, that DePalma’s data in his paper, which he claims to have lost, looks hinky as fuck. Price wrote about the original accusation in 2022.
posted by Kattullus at 3:51 AM on September 5 [7 favorites]
posted by Kattullus at 3:51 AM on September 5 [7 favorites]
(I should add: DePalma apparently faked isotope data *using a technique Melanie During created* after much blood, sweat and literal tears, and then sent to him in her master's thesis, only to be rewarded with really shitty jealous accusations from DePalma that almost ruined her career.)
posted by mediareport at 3:53 AM on September 5 [8 favorites]
posted by mediareport at 3:53 AM on September 5 [8 favorites]
De Palma previously on metafilter, back in 2019.
posted by Frowner at 6:33 AM on September 5 [5 favorites]
posted by Frowner at 6:33 AM on September 5 [5 favorites]
Hey everyone, google "Chixculub" for a good chuckle...
posted by rory at 6:52 AM on September 5 [15 favorites]
posted by rory at 6:52 AM on September 5 [15 favorites]
I hate that the internet has taught me that I really need someone to verify that De Palma's childhood friend Terry actually existed and died tragically young. It's a terribly unfair feeling to have if it's true, but so many frauds of one kind and another tell stories about tragic early losses that didn't happen.
posted by Frowner at 7:32 AM on September 5 [8 favorites]
posted by Frowner at 7:32 AM on September 5 [8 favorites]
"In childhood, I was tragically deprived of tragic deprivation."
posted by kaibutsu at 7:54 AM on September 5 [6 favorites]
posted by kaibutsu at 7:54 AM on September 5 [6 favorites]
I knew an anthropologist working with early hominid research. They characterized the science as being primarily driven by ego, and had the stories to back it up. Getting that Nature cover, finding the first, the earliest, naming a new species, etc. One of the problems here is the dearth of evidence. A little bit of this can be spun into whole stories full of details that may or may not have any evidence to back them up. Peer review can be more you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours than science. Speaking of which, science is supposed to be the realm of skeptics. Quite frankly, those of us who are not scientists need to be skeptical of what the scientists are saying.
posted by njohnson23 at 8:05 AM on September 5 [4 favorites]
posted by njohnson23 at 8:05 AM on September 5 [4 favorites]
The bully/paper remark reminds me of this recent Ask A Manager.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:35 AM on September 5 [1 favorite]
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:35 AM on September 5 [1 favorite]
The "cosplay" descriptions of DePalma have me wondering how much he desperately needs to live up to a romanticized self-image, and how much reality he would fabricate to achieve that. The story line here echoes the one of master forger Mark Hoffman, with so many big discoveries found by chance to match his ego. Doubters were also said to be jealous while everyone else was just happy to learn something new and amazing.
posted by Brian B. at 8:53 AM on September 5 [1 favorite]
posted by Brian B. at 8:53 AM on September 5 [1 favorite]
The field of paleontology is mean
Vertebrate paleontology certainly is.
Invertebrate paleontology, palaeobotatany, ichnology, micro-paleontology and all the other, even more niche, sub-disciplines are full of lovely people.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:57 AM on September 5 [9 favorites]
Vertebrate paleontology certainly is.
Invertebrate paleontology, palaeobotatany, ichnology, micro-paleontology and all the other, even more niche, sub-disciplines are full of lovely people.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:57 AM on September 5 [9 favorites]
People who do water-related coring, whether lakebed, ocean or ice (and whose work intersects with paleontology) tend to be very nice! People who work on pollen are nice! Sometimes hard partiers, but pleasant, good politics, etc!
posted by Frowner at 9:12 AM on September 5 [6 favorites]
posted by Frowner at 9:12 AM on September 5 [6 favorites]
Invertebrate paleontology... sub-disciplines are full of lovely people.
Makes sense that spineless scientists fight less.
posted by pwnguin at 10:08 AM on September 5 [14 favorites]
Makes sense that spineless scientists fight less.
posted by pwnguin at 10:08 AM on September 5 [14 favorites]
A good place to observe how annoying it is when scientists rename a label that everyone knows just for the hell of it.
posted by rory at 1:26 AM on September 5 [5 favorites +] [⚑]
Look, I'll admit that stratigraphic nomenclature can sometimes feel pretty abstruse but 'just for the hell of it' is a terribly unfair categorization.
'Tertiary' and 'Quaternary' have been deprecated terms for decades. I get that K/T rolls off the tongue a lot better than K/Pg, but there are good reasons to have retired this terminology.
posted by bumpkin at 10:10 AM on September 5 [3 favorites]
posted by rory at 1:26 AM on September 5 [5 favorites +] [⚑]
Look, I'll admit that stratigraphic nomenclature can sometimes feel pretty abstruse but 'just for the hell of it' is a terribly unfair categorization.
'Tertiary' and 'Quaternary' have been deprecated terms for decades. I get that K/T rolls off the tongue a lot better than K/Pg, but there are good reasons to have retired this terminology.
posted by bumpkin at 10:10 AM on September 5 [3 favorites]
My kids are on an all-Friends TV binge and Ross is kind of a dick
posted by gottabefunky at 10:10 AM on September 5 [3 favorites]
posted by gottabefunky at 10:10 AM on September 5 [3 favorites]
TIL that Ross was a paleontologist...(almost almost but not quite, makes me want to watch Friends)
posted by supermedusa at 11:11 AM on September 5 [2 favorites]
posted by supermedusa at 11:11 AM on September 5 [2 favorites]
Vertebrate palaeontologist though. Explains a lot.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 12:13 PM on September 5 [1 favorite]
posted by thatwhichfalls at 12:13 PM on September 5 [1 favorite]
Makes sense that spineless scientists fight less.
Spine-free, if you please.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:26 PM on September 5 [8 favorites]
Spine-free, if you please.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:26 PM on September 5 [8 favorites]
Oh lord. I'm trying to read this giant tome and I don't understand any of the science/publication drama worth a damn, but there are many pithy lines.
Also in town was a 70-year-old Dutch paleontologist named Jan Smit, a man she got to know the day she dissected an ostrich in his kitchen.
*boggleboggleboggle* More on this, plz?
He tells stories about the bones, some of them true.
FORESHADOWING!
One way that she makes herself known is by posting pictures of herself cradling a model of a baby T. rex like a prehistoric Pietà (“sweet baby Jesus Rex,” she calls it on Instagram) or riding a giant reconstructed dinosaur like a cowboy atop a horse. “I have had a great deal of criticism directed at my work,” she once said, “which was actually criticism of my flamboyant personality, my big mouth.”
She defended her master’s thesis in a dress she had sewn herself, in a print with triceratops and ankylosauruses marching across palm trees.
She sounds like someone I'd hang out with.
“You pee in the bushes,” she says, “you get chased by snakes, you find no fossils.”
I'll skip studying paleontology, then.
The Dutch school system makes distinctions early, and 12-year-old Melanie was placed on the least intellectual of three tracks, headed not for university but for trade school. Did Melanie want to be a plumber or a hairdresser? No one in her family had been to university. The decision to place a student on such a path is made, sometimes, with the knowledge that not all parents are capable of helping with rigorous schoolwork.
WOW. How limited and limiting of the Dutch. And look how well she did.
Having had to take care of herself for much of her childhood, find a bed, find dinner, she was too independent for her foster parents and successfully petitioned to be emancipated at the age of 17.
See, she could handle it!
This guy’s nuts, Johnson thought, and did not respond.
I can see why.
“To find an entire gecko in amber is, like, the holy grail,” says Johnson. This would have been a major, history-making discovery. “And he flashes this fuzzy image up on the screen and then takes it off, and then he leaves. And we’re all like, What the fuck was that? ”
“He proceeded to list a bunch of things that were outrageous. Like, ‘I found an egg of a pterosaur; I found dinosaur feathers.’”
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.
I smell rats.
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.
I smell so many rats that this could be the opening credits of The Decameron.
Cosplay is a word that comes up often in conversations about him; he favors an impractical leather hat, suspenders, dramatic looks into the distance.
it is worth noting that the field of paleontology has always had an element of costume.
I note a theme.
Along with all the dinosaurs, she painted exactly one rocket ship. (“He doesn’t have to be a paleontologist,” she told me.) In between being induced and giving birth, she painted three more paintings of birds. The baby would be named Odin, an anagram of dino.
This is adorable and also I'm like, "sure, Jan, he doesn't HAVE to be a paleontologist."
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:22 PM on September 5 [10 favorites]
Also in town was a 70-year-old Dutch paleontologist named Jan Smit, a man she got to know the day she dissected an ostrich in his kitchen.
*boggleboggleboggle* More on this, plz?
He tells stories about the bones, some of them true.
FORESHADOWING!
One way that she makes herself known is by posting pictures of herself cradling a model of a baby T. rex like a prehistoric Pietà (“sweet baby Jesus Rex,” she calls it on Instagram) or riding a giant reconstructed dinosaur like a cowboy atop a horse. “I have had a great deal of criticism directed at my work,” she once said, “which was actually criticism of my flamboyant personality, my big mouth.”
She defended her master’s thesis in a dress she had sewn herself, in a print with triceratops and ankylosauruses marching across palm trees.
She sounds like someone I'd hang out with.
“You pee in the bushes,” she says, “you get chased by snakes, you find no fossils.”
I'll skip studying paleontology, then.
The Dutch school system makes distinctions early, and 12-year-old Melanie was placed on the least intellectual of three tracks, headed not for university but for trade school. Did Melanie want to be a plumber or a hairdresser? No one in her family had been to university. The decision to place a student on such a path is made, sometimes, with the knowledge that not all parents are capable of helping with rigorous schoolwork.
WOW. How limited and limiting of the Dutch. And look how well she did.
Having had to take care of herself for much of her childhood, find a bed, find dinner, she was too independent for her foster parents and successfully petitioned to be emancipated at the age of 17.
See, she could handle it!
This guy’s nuts, Johnson thought, and did not respond.
I can see why.
“To find an entire gecko in amber is, like, the holy grail,” says Johnson. This would have been a major, history-making discovery. “And he flashes this fuzzy image up on the screen and then takes it off, and then he leaves. And we’re all like, What the fuck was that? ”
“He proceeded to list a bunch of things that were outrageous. Like, ‘I found an egg of a pterosaur; I found dinosaur feathers.’”
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.
I smell rats.
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.
I smell so many rats that this could be the opening credits of The Decameron.
Cosplay is a word that comes up often in conversations about him; he favors an impractical leather hat, suspenders, dramatic looks into the distance.
it is worth noting that the field of paleontology has always had an element of costume.
I note a theme.
Along with all the dinosaurs, she painted exactly one rocket ship. (“He doesn’t have to be a paleontologist,” she told me.) In between being induced and giving birth, she painted three more paintings of birds. The baby would be named Odin, an anagram of dino.
This is adorable and also I'm like, "sure, Jan, he doesn't HAVE to be a paleontologist."
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:22 PM on September 5 [10 favorites]
The Tanis site is so frustrating, because enough outsiders have visited it that it can be confirmed it's a fascinating site packed with fossils, but the guy controlling it is so shady that you can't really rely on any of his interpretations. At very best, science is being held back because DePalma is so desperately paranoid about being overshadowed, and at worst there's fraud going on.
But then, desperately paranoid and jealous of sharing data is a frequent issue in paleontology, I remember during the discussion of the Rising Star cave fossils that an article noted that a scientist who was very prominent in criticizing the excavation and its openness famously had been sitting on a key human fossil for a couple of decades, never fully publishing the description, which meant that other scientists couldn't publish articles on it.
posted by tavella at 2:49 PM on September 5 [7 favorites]
But then, desperately paranoid and jealous of sharing data is a frequent issue in paleontology, I remember during the discussion of the Rising Star cave fossils that an article noted that a scientist who was very prominent in criticizing the excavation and its openness famously had been sitting on a key human fossil for a couple of decades, never fully publishing the description, which meant that other scientists couldn't publish articles on it.
posted by tavella at 2:49 PM on September 5 [7 favorites]
get that K/T rolls off the tongue a lot better than K/Pg, but there are good reasons to have retired this terminology.
And the K? If it was going to change anyway, why not C-Pg? There are good reasons for English-speakers not to use the German name for the Cretaceous.
Fine, retire the label and replace it with one that brings to mind a global accountancy firm and a salted peanuts/builder's tea hybrid. I'll be over here with the English speakers who can't bring themselves to retire the K in "knight"...
posted by rory at 4:20 PM on September 5
And the K? If it was going to change anyway, why not C-Pg? There are good reasons for English-speakers not to use the German name for the Cretaceous.
Fine, retire the label and replace it with one that brings to mind a global accountancy firm and a salted peanuts/builder's tea hybrid. I'll be over here with the English speakers who can't bring themselves to retire the K in "knight"...
posted by rory at 4:20 PM on September 5
C-Pg is at least more easily pronounceable, so I support you Rory.
posted by tavella at 4:31 PM on September 5
posted by tavella at 4:31 PM on September 5
An especially nasty area of academia
so that's why they don't say "pally"-ontology
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 4:43 PM on September 5 [1 favorite]
so that's why they don't say "pally"-ontology
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 4:43 PM on September 5 [1 favorite]
And the K? If it was going to change anyway, why not C-Pg? There are good reasons for English-speakers not to use the German name for the Cretaceous.
Because C is already the abbreviation for the Carboniferous period, which is a whole era earlier than the Cretaceous period.
posted by adrienneleigh at 5:38 PM on September 5 [1 favorite]
Because C is already the abbreviation for the Carboniferous period, which is a whole era earlier than the Cretaceous period.
posted by adrienneleigh at 5:38 PM on September 5 [1 favorite]
(The period abbreviations go, in order:
PreꞒ Ꞓ O S D C P T J K Pg N Q
)
posted by adrienneleigh at 5:41 PM on September 5 [2 favorites]
PreꞒ Ꞓ O S D C P T J K Pg N Q
)
posted by adrienneleigh at 5:41 PM on September 5 [2 favorites]
Well, my practical upshot is that now I fully hate DePalma, whom I was completely unaware of previously.
…so, well done sir, I guess?
My hate locker is starting to get a bit full.
posted by aramaic at 7:46 PM on September 5 [4 favorites]
…so, well done sir, I guess?
My hate locker is starting to get a bit full.
posted by aramaic at 7:46 PM on September 5 [4 favorites]
Not finished with the article yet either but I'm l o v i n g the interpersonal sniping throughout to really illustrate how especially petty paleontology is
posted by coolname at 8:26 PM on September 5 [1 favorite]
posted by coolname at 8:26 PM on September 5 [1 favorite]
This is a great read. Favorite quip:
'“I can’t imagine what it would be like to drive a wagon out here,” he said, clearly imagining it.'
posted by kaibutsu at 9:02 PM on September 5 [7 favorites]
'“I can’t imagine what it would be like to drive a wagon out here,” he said, clearly imagining it.'
posted by kaibutsu at 9:02 PM on September 5 [7 favorites]
I can’t really carry this line much further without it looking as if I’m far more serious about it than my “for the hell of it” was ever meant to be. Obviously scientists will do what they will. But resolving the overlapping initials of the Cretaceous and the Carboniferous by abbreviating one to K and the other to C is… uh…not that convincing when the Cambrian is right there and all three are K words in German.
I’m just glad we’ve got “Brontosaurus” back.
posted by rory at 10:10 PM on September 5
I’m just glad we’ve got “Brontosaurus” back.
posted by rory at 10:10 PM on September 5
Well, one of them is Ꞓ and one is C, so the third one had to be SOMETHING else. K is as good a letter as any.
posted by adrienneleigh at 11:44 AM on September 6
posted by adrienneleigh at 11:44 AM on September 6
(Also there's a certain amount of niceness, to me, in the fact that "K" comes right after "J" in geologic time!)
posted by adrienneleigh at 11:45 AM on September 6
posted by adrienneleigh at 11:45 AM on September 6
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In front of the class, the teacher crumpled a piece of paper into a ball and flattened it back out. This, she said, is what happens when you bully someone and then apologize. The paper is never quite right again.
That's brilliant.
He named the crater Chicxulub specifically “to give the academics and NASA naysayers a challenging time pronouncing it after a decade of their dismissals.”
Ha!
posted by rory at 12:21 AM on September 5 [18 favorites]