Other researchers believe that the authors of the paper falsified the results.
In December 2021, a team of scientists published a study in which stated that the timing of the fall of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, which occurred 66 million years ago, can be traced back to the time of year – spring. And it was possible to do this thanks to the analysis of fossils found in North Dakota.
Now another team has accused the first of data falsification, Gizmodo reports. The journal that published the original study added an editorial note that the data is under review.
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The situation was first reported by Science magazine last month. Melanie Düring, a paleontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, submitted the paper for publication in the June 2021 issue of Nature. The main conclusion of the article was that the large asteroid that crashed into the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period struck in the spring. The scientist came to this conclusion by studying fossilized fish found in North Dakota.
But two months before Dühring's article was published, an article appeared in Scientific Reports, “which makes almost the same conclusion that is based on a completely different data set,” reports Science. The latest paper was published by a team led by Robert DePalma, a former Dühring collaborator and paleontologist now at the University of Manchester.
Both studies reached a similar conclusion based on analysis of fossils from the Tanis Formation in North Dakota. The remains of numerous sea creatures were discovered there, which most likely died immediately after the asteroid hit.
In an article published in Science, DePalma “sought to take credit for the discovery and fabricated data, to state their claims”.
Both papers examined 66-million-year-old paddlefish jawbones and sturgeon fin spines from the Tanis Formation. Fish contain isotopic records and evidence of how they grow over the years, analogous to tree rings. In turn, the remains of the fish showed the time of the end of their life, that is, the exact time of the devastating impact of the asteroid on Yucatan Island.
Last month, Dühring posted a comment on PubPeer claiming that the data in DePalma's article may be fabricated. In this commentary, the researcher, her co-author Dennis Wojten and her supervisor Per Alberg highlight the anomalies in the other group's isotopic analysis, the lack of primary data, the insufficient description of the methods and the fact that DePalma's team did not specify the laboratory in which the analyzes were performed.
As Science clarifies, the isotopic data in DePalma's article was collected by archaeologist Curtis McKinney, who died in 2017. It is not clear where McKinney performed the analysis, and the raw data was not included in the published paper.
DePalma, however, stated that he would “never falsify data or samples, and never did so to fit the data to the other team's results.”
But Scientific Reports added a footnote to DePalma's article on Dec. 9. It reads: “Readers are cautioned that the reliability of the data presented in this manuscript is currently in question. Appropriate editorial action will be taken once this matter has been resolved.”
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On the same day, Alberg and Wojten announced that they had filed a potential research misconduct complaint against DePalma and Philip Manning with the University of Manchester. , one of the co-authors of the article.
