7 ms·

Paleontologist accused of faking data in dino-killing asteroid paper

105 points by xqcgrek2 4y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> 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.
- ComputerGuru 4y ago
  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.) [1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-di...
- defrost 4y ago
  He's 41 and may well be independantly wealthy from family, etc. 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanis_(fossil_site) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Forrest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Forrest
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  >How does a grad student hold the lease to a famed fossil site? There is more to this story. 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.
- keepquestioning 4y ago
  DePalma is up to something. This will not end well for all parties
ComputerGuru 4y ago
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".) [1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-di... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19526679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19526679
- xqcgrek2 4y ago
  Some of the comments in the HN thread who found DePalma's story inspiring did not age well.
  - andrewflnr 4y ago
    Let's wait for some more evidence before we convict him, shall we?
    - q1w2 4y ago
      Unlikely to be additional evidence. The author died - all original data lost.
      - ComputerGuru 4y ago
        To be pedantic, DePalma says the data was with the author who had already died at the point of that claim.
      - andrewflnr 4y ago
        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".
autoexec 4y ago
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?
- greentea22 4y ago
  - autoexec 4y ago
    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.
  - agolio 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > 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".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
halpmeh 4y ago
During, the other author, also has an incentive to discredit DePalma so she can claim to be the sole discoverer of the asteroid timing. Without conclusive evidence, it’s irresponsible to get out the pitchforks.
- labster 4y ago
  This is literally not true; DePalma is a coauthor on the other paper.
  - halpmeh 4y ago
    No he’s not: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04446-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04446-1 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.
    - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
      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.
      - halpmeh 4y ago
        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.
        trompetenaccoun 4y ago
        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.
LarsDu88 4y ago
pelagicAustral 4y ago
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]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33898789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33898789
- xqcgrek2 4y ago
  It's always been this way. Isaac Newton famously trashed Robert Hooke by calling him short and ugly, and suppressed his work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Personality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Personality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hooke#Personality_and_disputes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hooke#Personality_and_d...
  - pelagicAustral 4y ago
    Shocking lack of citations on that single paragraph, isn't?
- trompetenaccoun 4y ago
  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.
  - russdill 4y ago
    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.
doodlebugging 4y ago
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. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Paleontology/comments/zfj0ll/sad_and_frustrating_dakotaraptor_update/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Paleontology/comments/zfj0ll/sad_an... [1] https://twitter.com/paleopaws/status/1600520038070587395 https://twitter.com/paleopaws/status/1600520038070587395 [2] https://thesauropodomorphlair.wordpress.com/2019/09/28/nuking-anzuraptor/ https://thesauropodomorphlair.wordpress.com/2019/09/28/nukin... [3] https://twitter.com/TomHoltzPaleo/status/1600577537868181504 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.
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  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?
  - Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
    I read that the same way - seems to defend his claims rather than refute them.
    - doodlebugging 4y ago
      I agree that the poster in link [2] defends DePalma's taxonomic placement of Dakotaraptor.
  - doodlebugging 4y ago
Waterluvian 4y ago
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.
andrewflnr 4y ago
Key quote IMO: > 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.
skybrian 4y ago
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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports

105 points by xqcgrek2 4y ago

> 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.

ComputerGuru 4y ago
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.) [1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-di...
defrost 4y ago
He's 41 and may well be independantly wealthy from family, etc. 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanis_(fossil_site) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Forrest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Forrest
boomboomsubban 4y ago
>How does a grad student hold the lease to a famed fossil site? There is more to this story. 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.
keepquestioning 4y ago
DePalma is up to something. This will not end well for all parties

ComputerGuru 4y ago

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".) [1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-di... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19526679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19526679

xqcgrek2 4y ago
Some of the comments in the HN thread who found DePalma's story inspiring did not age well.
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  Let's wait for some more evidence before we convict him, shall we?
  - q1w2 4y ago
    Unlikely to be additional evidence. The author died - all original data lost.
    - ComputerGuru 4y ago
      To be pedantic, DePalma says the data was with the author who had already died at the point of that claim.
    - andrewflnr 4y ago
      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".

autoexec 4y ago

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?

greentea22 4y ago
- autoexec 4y ago
  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.
- agolio 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > 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".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

halpmeh 4y ago

During, the other author, also has an incentive to discredit DePalma so she can claim to be the sole discoverer of the asteroid timing. Without conclusive evidence, it’s irresponsible to get out the pitchforks.

labster 4y ago
This is literally not true; DePalma is a coauthor on the other paper.
- halpmeh 4y ago
  No he’s not: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04446-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04446-1 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.
  - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
    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.
    - halpmeh 4y ago
      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.
      - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
        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.

LarsDu88 4y ago

pelagicAustral 4y ago

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]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33898789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33898789

xqcgrek2 4y ago
It's always been this way. Isaac Newton famously trashed Robert Hooke by calling him short and ugly, and suppressed his work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Personality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Personality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hooke#Personality_and_disputes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hooke#Personality_and_d...
- pelagicAustral 4y ago
  Shocking lack of citations on that single paragraph, isn't?
trompetenaccoun 4y ago
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.
- russdill 4y ago
  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.

doodlebugging 4y ago

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. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Paleontology/comments/zfj0ll/sad_and_frustrating_dakotaraptor_update/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Paleontology/comments/zfj0ll/sad_an... [1] https://twitter.com/paleopaws/status/1600520038070587395 https://twitter.com/paleopaws/status/1600520038070587395 [2] https://thesauropodomorphlair.wordpress.com/2019/09/28/nuking-anzuraptor/ https://thesauropodomorphlair.wordpress.com/2019/09/28/nukin... [3] https://twitter.com/TomHoltzPaleo/status/1600577537868181504 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.

andrewflnr 4y ago
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?
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
  I read that the same way - seems to defend his claims rather than refute them.
  - doodlebugging 4y ago
    I agree that the poster in link [2] defends DePalma's taxonomic placement of Dakotaraptor.
- doodlebugging 4y ago

Waterluvian 4y ago

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.

andrewflnr 4y ago

Key quote IMO: > 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.

skybrian 4y ago

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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports