More on the fossil site described in that New Yorker article about the dinosaur die-off
[Hat tip: commenter Ted Clayton.]
Wednesday I wrote this post about a New Yorker article on a huge fossil find that purports to be evidence of the asteroid strike that caused widespread geological perturbations that swiftly killed the dinosaurs and many other creatures around the globe. Now the Smithsonian magazine has weighed in on the find and what’s been claimed about it:
Many paleontologists were quick to raise an eyebrow at the findings presented in the New Yorker, however, particularly because some of the claims in the article are not mentioned in a scientific paper about the site. That research, published by DePalma and colleagues, was released Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The only dinosaur fossil mentioned in the paper is a weathered hip fragment, but the study is nevertheless causing a stir as a window into the extreme effects caused by the asteroid impact.
“Unfortunately, many interesting aspects of this study appear only in the New Yorker article and not in the scientific paper,” says Kirk Johnson, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “This is a sloppy way to conduct science and it leaves open many questions. At the present moment, interesting data are presented in the paper while other elements of the story that could be data are, for the moment, only rumors.”
As for the paper itself, the details are part of a broader picture of what transpired 66 million years ago in western North America, along the margins of a vanishing seaway that was draining off the continent at the time. According to DePalma and colleagues, seismic waves emanating from the asteroid impact reached the Tanis area within minutes. The disturbance sloshed local bodies of water in a phenomenon called a seiche—similar to water flowing back and forth in a bathtub—tossing fish and other organisms around in the wave. “As far as we can tell,” DePalma says in an email, “the majority of the articulated carcasses are from animals that were either killed when they were encapsulated by the muddy sediment, or very shortly prior as part of the same violent inundation surge event.”…
Sites demarcating the K/Pg boundary have been found all over the world, and vertebrate fossils at or within the boundary have also been discovered before. Part of what makes the Tanis site stand out, DePalma says, is that “this is the first known example of articulated carcasses, likely killed as a direct result of the impact, associated with the boundary.”
Despite the controversy over how claims of the site hit mass media before the peer-reviewed science paper was available, outside experts note that Tanis truly does seem to be an exceptional spot. “This isn’t the only site that preserves fossils at the K/Pg boundary, but it seems this might be the most sensational one ever discovered,” says Shaena Montanari, a paleontologist and AAAS science and technology policy fellow. The fossil preservation of the fish in particular stands out as unusual.
Here are some of the fish (the site is from 66 million years ago):
More reservations, not about the site itself but about its interpretation and meaning:
Other geologic details of the site also merit further investigation. “It seems like the geochemical data are scant and in some cases being stretched a bit to make interpretations,” Montanari says, “although this is not a new thing for paleontology.”,,,
University of California, Berkeley paleontologist Pat Holroyd says that the estimations of when and how quickly the Tanis site formed are based on models without consideration of other possible interpretations. “I don’t think there is any way to conclusively determine the exact amount of time represented in the site,” she says, “but it would have been useful to see how they estimated it.”
The details of what the site actually looks like, and how the layers were deposited, is not clear from what was published in the paper, Holroyd says. Such data is needed to compare Tanis to other K/Pg sites around the world.
It’s good to be cautious, although there are some very exciting things about this find. I also have to say that although computer modeling is certainly of interest, unless we know every variable (and certainly every variable of any importance) that goes into an event, modeling can mislead and create a false state of certainty where none exists.
What stood out to me was when the article mentioned that DePalma wanted to keep the site a secret, as a way to prevent more established paleontologists/large institutions from being able to swoop in and wrest the site away from him.
Given the kind of dog eat dog, competitive atmosphere that apparently exists in the world of paleontology, I can see how other paleontologists would have a lot of incentives to deny that his discovery was legit and/or as important as DePalma claims it is, or to imply that he wasn’t skilled enough to do a god job of exploiting this site.
“….what transpired 66 million years ago in western North America, along the margins of a vanishing seaway that was draining off the continent at the time. …”
And we are supposed to believe that present day climate is not well within the more moderate climate regimes that have existed over the last several million years.
Really?
Obviously, this “seaway,” which inundated much of the central USA must have been caused by the melting ice caps due to the excessive numbers of coal fired plants in operation at the time and/or too darn many SUVs driven by Neanderthals? Denisovians? Australopithicans? Trump supporters?
Yep, the science sure is settled !!!
I understand John Tyler’s having fun. I mentioned this page showing the maps of the Western Interior Seaway over geological time and I’ll throw it out once again, because I find it so cool:
https://deeptimemaps.com/western-interior-seaway-thumbnails/
At the KT boundary — the old designation for K/Pg — the Seaway had dried up to some linked puddles compared to its former glory, but the main bit covered most of North Dakota near DePalma’s site. That’s the water, according to DePalma, which sloshed around and created the seiche wave which killed his fish and other life.
Given DePalma’s junior level in the seniority pyramid of paleontologists:
I cannot help but recall the story of the discovery of Pulsars, and the resulting “No Bell Prize” that was awarded.
Google “Joycelin Bell Burnell” (whose pre-marriage name, Joycelin Bell, was current during her graduate student days when she found a signal that was (semi-humorously) ascribed to “Little Green Men” due to its regularity and repeatability.
A Nobel Prize just could not be awarded to a graduate student.
unless we know every variable (and certainly every variable of any importance)
that goes into an event, modeling can mislead and create a false state of certainty where none exists.
this is so wrong as to not even be close to right..
and why people dont understand the global warming simulation crap…
its crap
let me explain why your assertion is very very wrong, in TONS of areas..
ok.. lets start with the EASIEST… lets imagine that god comes down and
gives you all the right starting numbers, angles, forces, and so on…
[this is Gedanken and i am VERY good at it… ]
here is where the problem comes in.. on what the heck do you run your simulation on?
do you want to run it on my super computer where i work? Minerva? a Cray, which i ran something on once long ago.
Deep Thought?
how about this, they ALL share the same problem and there is no solution..
the rounding problem…
there are 15 ways to round numbers…
and of course, your system is binary, so to what decimal place
would you go to before your thoughts assume it doesn’t matter?
The biggest/largest integer that can be stored in a double without losing precision is the same as the largest possible value of a double. That is, DBL_MAX or approximately 1.8 × 10 raised to the 308 (if your double is an IEEE 754 64-bit double). It’s an integer. It’s represented exactly.
ah well, yeah, every number in a computer is really an integer.. but at some point your going to have to round numbers.
and rounding injects errors, and the real world has no such errors, and your supercomputer does!
you put your perfect numbers in from god, and binary math and the state of the machine will inject errors as you go forward
this is ONE reason that simulations get worse and worse the farther you project them into the future
but wait, thats not all, this rounding issue happens in two axis…
why? cause even if you didnt have to round numbers to run the simulation (for some god like miracle)
your not going to actually key in or record the state of all the atoms.. ie. what granularity will your simulation have?
[and THAT opens a door to a bunch more choices your forced to make… you know, a desktop simulation of the universe would be so slow just to run it for a minute of simulation time would take more time than the universe took to be the universe]
so unless your going to go down to the nuclear level where all atoms are equal, and known weights, your going to have to round the system by choosing a scale, usually set to where your computational limit is… and round there… for instance, the global warming simulations make squares for the cellular automata type calculation iterative simulation about 400 kilometers.. the hold the sun to a steady state… and tons more regular people arguing NEVER ASK
but now… what fundamental physical concept/s proves that you cant get the numbers from god? Even if you could run a simulation that would include all atomic matter.
welcome to in order of stickyness as i see it / Heisenberg uncertainty principal / virtual particles / entanglement / quantum tunneling .. and we can even throw in the observer effect… [anyone want to throw in dark energy and matter?]
which will screw up ALL simulations except the potential simulation we live in (just one more odd physics idea like the holographic projection on an internal sphere… )..
its one of those wacky things most people don’t know about their universe as they live more a tick tock newtonian one, than what is actually around them… (but boy, if you knew what i knew and could “see” what i see looking at it, we are truly amazing critters all lit up like xmas trees in the dark and more… )
1 Heisenberg – In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle (also known as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, known as complementary variables or canonically conjugate variables such as position x and momentum p, can be known.
ouch, but as Richard Feynman points out, if you cant explain it in normal terms you dont understand it, and he was one of the few who even got close to “getting” this stuff… (try QED sometime. i was reading that at 11… )
it more easily translates to:
the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa
this is a physical property of the universe..
Historically, the uncertainty principle has been confused with a related effect in physics, called the observer effect, which notes that measurements of certain systems cannot be made without affecting the systems, that is, without changing something in a system. Heisenberg utilized such an observer effect at the quantum level (see below) as a physical “explanation” of quantum uncertainty.
double bind, eh?
and how would your simulation predict the unpredictable? ie. where does a virtual particle appear? depending on where it appears it has different effects… at the event horizon of a black hole, it causes the black hole to slowly evaporate till there is no more black hole, or rather till there isnt enough matter and the thing blows up (like our universe?).
i could cover the rest of the list (in my sleep backwards) but obviously simulations ARE useful…
however, the point here is in what way… real simulations like that in engineering, and certain areas, like electronics, which are used every day, are pretty good… even the most expensive electronics package isnt perfect in its simulations… and you would think it would be.. no? its a lot easier than the things that these other researchers are claiming to be doing.
then if the above isnt enough… you dont get your measures from god, rules are broken, lower morals and higher desire to win, and on and on…
Oh, and it heavily depends on how much you actually know about the systems your simulating!!!
the public feels that simulations can reveal things about unknown systems but they cant…
its a good way to sort good and possible from crap and no freaking way
its akin to how you build a building.. those built tall on good known foundations stand, those that are slapped together without any special knowledge of the foundation are crappy…
and i havent even touched on what KIND is the best?
becaue AI type learning nets are all about structure and test cases and presentation
and when you stop teaching and so on.. they work where things can be intuited…
their down fall is that they Always give an answer, even if its wrong, they have no way to self check
so they always spit out something…
mathematical simulations or physical ones need knowlege of the most dominant physical forces involved
and i mean a good knowlege..
another global warming simulation issue that i see all the time is that they are not great scientists or good, and so, they tend to misapply physics… then win in the theater of bullying… not debate..
i dont blame them too much in terms of the laws of thermodynamics since we kind of shortened them
they are special laws in which the law only applies in certain systems.. it does NOT apply in a open system..
to quote engineering..
The application of the First Law of Thermodynamics to open systems is really just an application for closed systems.
It works cause beneath these laws is conservation of energy..
thats it.. sorry
no one to talk to about stuff like this any more…
Good grief Artfldgr, you. need an informed listener. Delightful to see all this — inchoate as appears in places — in one post
Artfldgr:
I was not speaking of all computer modeling generally. I thought it was understood I was speaking in the context of events such as the one described in this post. I wrote: “unless we know every variable (and certainly every variable of any importance) that goes into an event” [emphasis added]. The types of events I was thinking about were events in nature in the natural and historical world such as the effects of the asteroid strike, or global warming. I should have made it even more clear than I did that I was intending that to be the context of the “events” in my remark.
Wikipedia has a new page up for Tanis_(fossil_site).
They include an collage-image contain a geological diagram, photos of the general setting of the site, and maps showing the inland sea of the time. Tanis fossil site, locator map and layout.jpg
Wikipedia is jumping on this, so resources here will probably improve quickly.
Oops. That Wikipedia image is from the DePalma paper … so only us people still on smoke-signals Internet didn’t see it already … but the Wiki-page is promising.
Artfldgr,
Frankns, above, said:
I agree. :>)))
artfldgr has a few issues. A) He has an encyclopedic memory. B) He has to always remind everyone how smart he is. C) He is arrogant. and D) He is tone deef, he never grogs why many find him insufferable.
That said, he is brilliant (don’t let it go to your head artfldgr) and very knowledgeable. Unfortunately, that leads him to blaffer and overly groom his feathers. IF one’s commit is more letters than the hostess’s post, one is AOC cow farts. And that is not restricted to artfldger. You know who you are, get your own blog to blatter on. Look into the mirror that tells you are the fairest. Guess what, you’re not.
Too many letters for me. Gooenight.
Artfldgr at 6:17 pm
I missed the part of the presentation that covered Operational Amplifiers, their origin in WWII weapons fire-control computation, early adaptation (still in tube-format) of the circuit as a formal electronic Model platform, and the minor mania that ensued for OpAmp modelling experiments (esp. in biology & medicine).
Thanks, ‘n my pardon!
Ted — Thanks and a thousand thanks for showing how to add a suffix to a word ending in a short vowel followed by a single consonant!!
“Model” becomes “modelling” — “double-the-consonant-add-ing.
Quite so. Hallelujah! :>)))))
dgr’s gotten so wound up and identified with being smart, he’s forgotten how to become wise.
As for the original article in The New Yorker this followup makes me even more certain that the only thing of value The New Yorker has taught us in over ten years is to never trust The New Yorker. Yes, The New Yorker.
Snow on Pine on April 5, 2019 at 4:44 pm at 4:44 pm said:
What stood out to me was when the article mentioned that DePalma wanted to keep the site a secret, as a way to prevent more established paleontologists/large institutions from being able to swoop in and wrest the site away from him.
* * *
IIRC, the New Yorker article mentioned that he had loaned his “childhood” collection of fossils to a museum that went belly-up, and he wasn’t able to get them back from the other museums that “inherited” them.
Once burned, twice shy.
And yes, many professors will steal anything their grad students come up with.
Reminds me of the old observation that academic arguments are so vicious because they are over such little, even trivial matters.
It really does not matter today if the dinosaurs et al were killed by an asteroid impact or by something else (e.g. a new pathogenic bacteria or massive global cooling), sixty-six million years ago.
If it matters substantively, please so state, and why. No BS about “understanding the Earth and its ways”, please.
Julie, we’d still just be leaving the occasional primate fossil after getting caught by a landslide, or in the muck after a lakeshore drowning … if not for Language! 🙂
Cicero at 12:53am
At the risk of being one of the asinine academics … or worse, unsubstantive! … I think there can be a worthwhile take-away here.
First, to gain some critical thinking skill & experience. In a consumer-society, information too is packaged & distributed for “passive” consumption.
Second, to detect agendae. Much pablum & tripe, is not neutral … and the deviation from neutrality is not to our benefit. By design.
Third, without Evolution, Torquemada returns. Without addressing extinction, how impressive is our grasp of evolution?
Evolution is in trouble-enough already. Darwin knew perfectly well that Natural Selection was a weak foundation, a ‘preliminary’ – even somewhat shallow & trivial – treatment; he prominently positioned Sexual Selection in his base work, and steadily developed a better command of Hybridization.
As evolution exhibits various cracks, gaps, peeling & corrosion, Religions remember how it was used to attack & diminish them. And how it was raise up as Fact.
Extinction is a major component of evolution. We want to take a credible & effective approach with it, to avoid diminishing evolution further.
Cicero:
The saying about academia usually goes something like this:
Academic politics are so vicious, because the stakes are so small.
The emphasis has always been on politics. Now that the Left has succeeded in its long march through the institutions, parts of academic politics have become an almost universal left-wing political indoctrination. The viciousness remains, but the effects are far from trivial. Has the old saying become an anachronism?
Academic arguments, defined more broadly, can often be trivial, but I happen to think that understanding the history of life isn’t a trivial thing. Understanding an event that almost led to the end of all life on earth seems particularly interesting. It’s hard for me to even imagine someone who thinks that it’s just bullshit. Are there a lot of people like you? Maybe somebody needs to do a survey and post the interviews on YouTube. Who knows what people really think? I’m curious, but why should I care? For all I know, you could get hit by an asteroid tomorrow. Put that on YouTube, and I’d take a look, but that’s just me.
Cicero: Cornflour is correct. The saying is about academic politics, not academic knowledge.
University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
–Henry Kissinger
Sayre’s law states, in a formulation quoted by Charles Philip Issawi: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.” By way of corollary, it adds: “That is why academic politics are so bitter.”
–https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre’s_law
If one is so inclined, it’s trivial to dismiss any matter as something that doesn’t matter.
It really does not matter today, if you, Cicero, die in the next ten minutes. If it matters substantively, please so state, and why. No BS about “you enjoy living or you have a soul or whatever,” please.
The above is intended as a philosophical argument — reductio ad absurdum — not a personal attack.
However, taking Cicero’s argument seriously that knowing how the dinosaurs died 66 mya does not matter…
I say one never knows. Understanding the KT extinction might well matter if we, as humans, intend to survive a similar extinction event. Such an event is coming, sooner or later. A sizable asteroid impact is definitely in our future.
Nobel Laureate biochemist and inventor of PCR, Kary Mullis writes that string theory is all well and good, but he thinks physicists ought to devote more time to preventing rocks from landing on our heads.
Ted Clayton: Have you heard of Kary Mullis? He has similar reservations to yours about Big Science.
Admittedly Mullis is a maverick and contrarian to put it charitably. He’s on various lists as bonkers, crazy or insane. He takes advantage of his Nobel to say things scientists should not say. Naturally I find him refreshing.
Here’s an amusing TED Talk where he tells the story working out enough rocketry when he was 14 to launch a frog over two miles high and return the frog safely to earth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSVy1b-RyVM
Huxley–University politics are, indeed, vicious.
Two personal examples–
My Professor of Japanese history at the university I was attending for an undergraduate degree was the key person necessary to get a new degree program and Department of East Asian Studies accredited; once he was secure in his position the new degree program/department was set to expand, hire new staff, and to start to offer a wide array of courses.
This professor had personal experience in Japan, had worked at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo for several years, spoke perfect Japanese, was well versed in literature on the subject, had a long list of research and articles to his credit, etc.–he was working his ass off to attain tenure and appeared to be an excellent scholar. He was also a good guy and a great teacher.
The University had also prepared for accreditation of this new major by expending what were likely hundreds of thousands of dollars to beef up their library collections of material in this area of study, to set up more space and to buy new Japanese and Chinese language materials for their language laboratories, etc.–things were all set to go.
But, rumor had it that the other professors in the History department were not happy that, seven years ago, instead of hiring yet another Professor of American or European History, this Professor of Japanese History had been hired, and that his new department was going to be competing against American and European history programs and professors for university funds.
Long story short, when I was taking his classes, the 7 years he needed to wait for a tenure decision had elapsed, whereupon the other History professors on the tenure committee voted to deny him tenure and, instead, he was given a one year terminal appointment as an administrator.
This ended, I presume, his chances of getting tenure anywhere, and his academic career.
His enemies in the History department had waited for the perfect time, and when the moment came, struck, taking out the professor and the new rival East Asian Studies major/department as well.
P.S.–To make things even worse, from what I understood, this professor had a wife and a couple of kids, his wife was very seriously ill, and he devoted whatever time he had left in the day, after his academic work, to caring for his wife, severely crippled and home-bound after being hit by a car and barely surviving a horrendous accident.
I thought this was a rotten trick they had played on him, on the University Administration, and on those of us students who were looking forward to this new degree program.
Example two–Graduate school several decades ago, and each member of our class had allocated to them a certain amount of computer time on the University’s huge main frame, housed in it’s own huge and imposing, specially air conditioned glassed off section of the building.
One day, I went to take my little stack of Hollerith cards that I had punched to run through the card reader for input to the computer, and was told I had no time.
Turns out that none of us in the class had any computer time, because a professor who apparently didn’t like our professor/was his rival had managed to steal all of the computer time that was allocated to our class for himself/his class.
A friend of mine was non-tenured at Occidental College, a far left institution. His wife was chair of Math Department. The faculty learned he had conservative politics and denied tenure. Then, while he was looking for another job, they tried to talk his wife into staying. Deny tenure and break up the marriage. They are both now at another university
While we’re on this subject, take a look at this article out today at
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/how-professional-merit-and-scientific-objectivity-became-casualties-of-social-justice-insanity/
Dr. Kary Mullis, scourge of Orthodoxy
No, Huxley, I was unaware of Mullis, but looked at his Wikipedia entry. (I barely have 256k DSL, and others around here are on 56/28k Dialup, so no YouTube. Moving is a goal, so I can tackle a growing list of high-bandwidth dependent interests.)
Clearly, bare minimum, probably understated, could be DRASTICALLY … understanding and breakthroughs are NOT the sole province of hypothesis-test & analysis … free-association and fully-formed – ‘flash’ – insight is the fount of much creativity.
The discovery of the chemical ring-structure of Benzene, which was a more-general chemistry breakthrough, is famously related to have come to August Kekule in a “reverie or day-dream” (seeing a snake bite it’s tail). He died in the 1890s … no LSD.
Isaac Newton was vegging-out in the orchard, when the plop of an apple ‘triggered’ the gravity-breakthrough.
I think it is entirely possible that a large part of all progress in Science happens this way. That what actually happens, how it really works, is often deliberately misrepresented, so that workers can present themselves in a conventional light. But actually, the key events do not follow a scientific process. Ie, ‘pure science’ alone can’t get it done.
Although I do not put any stock in Astrology etc, I do think/accept that various forms of ‘divination’ do/can work ‘as advertised’, in much the same way that earnest prayer helps people to work through issues. Folks can’t BS God … and once they drop the BS, then problem-solving goes much better. No magic … just clearing-out the crud!
I’m also not conspiracy-oriented. BS oriented, yes: Look out for the BS! From way back in public school, I could ‘smell a rat’, in textbooks or lectures. Conspiracies are too hard – ‘they’ aren’t in cahoots … “he” or “she” or “that” is just BS’ing us.
Nice addition to the scientist/intellectual free-spirits list. Thanks!
Ted Clayton: IMO wiki overemphasizes Mullis’s wackiness. Wiki is not entirely to be blamed because Mullis, I believe, enjoys tweaking people that way.
However, he came to his positions on astrology, AIDS, climate change and UFOs honestly. He has his reasons.
For instance, re: astrology — back in the seventies, when people talked about astrological signs, he encountered three people in three months who each called Mullis as a Capricorn with barely a thought. Mullis is a Capricorn and he can do the math. The odds were 1728:1. Then he got his horoscope calculated wrong, fixed it, then presented several of his friends with both versions (including the reading) and they all picked the right horoscope.
That’s impressive but still anecdotal. I’m sure Mullis knows this. But it is interesting and I believe Mullis’s advocacy boils down to a message to stick with the data you find and the scientific method, as opposed to the consensus du jour.
His memoir, “Dancing in a Mind Field,” explains this and other matters. It’s great fun reading and makes you think.