Paleontologist accused of faking data in dino-killing asteroid paper

Melanie During submitted a manuscript to Nature in June of 2021. The asteroid that ended the dinosaur era 65 million years ago struck Earth when it was in the Northern Hemisphere, based on the chemical signatures and bone growth patterns found in fossils.

While her paper was still being reviewed, a PhD candidate received a shock of her own. Robert DePalma, who was listed as the second author on the study, published a paper of his own in Scientific Reports, which reached the same conclusion as the first one. After his paper was accepted by Nature and published in February, he suspects that DePalma wanted to scoop her and make up the data to claim credit for the discovery.

She decided to make her suspicions public after trying to talk to editors at Scientific Reports. She and her supervisor, Per Ahlberg, have shared their concerns with Science, and on 3 December, During posted a statement on the journal feedback website PubPeer. On the OSF Preprints server, she posted the statement.

The plotted line graphs and figures in DePalma's paper contain many discrepancies, including missing and duplicated data points and nonsensical error bars. The data underlying his analyses has not been made public. A member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences asked if they exist.

DePalma is a PhD student at the University of Manchester. He told Science that they wouldn't have fabricated data or samples to fit the results. After discussions over publishing a joint paper went nowhere, the study was published in Scientific Reports. Both studies appeared in print within weeks of each other.

He says the data is missing because the scientist who ran the analyses died years before the paper was published.

Several independent scientists consulted about the case by Science agreed the Scientific Reports paper contains suspiciousIrregularities, and most were surprised that the paper was published in the first place If DePalma's team wants to clear themselves, they need to come up with the raw data behind their analyses.

Mauricio Barbi is a high energy physicist at the University ofRegina who specializes in applying physics methods to paleontology The paper needs to be explained. Fraud is a possibility if not.

The case will involve bluster and smoke-blowing until the authors produce a primary record of their lab work.

Two independent scientists who reviewed the data behind the paper shortly after it was published said they were satisfied with its authenticity.

The journal is aware of concerns with the paper and is looking into them. The investigation is still going on, so he wouldn't say anything.

The most phenomenal site

She was a student at the Free University of Amsterdam. She met DePalma when she was a graduate student at the University of Kansas. The lease to the Tanis site is held by DePalma, who controls access to it.

Tanis was located on the shore of the Western Interior Seaway 65 million years ago. The impact of the asteroid would cause a huge water surge in the shallows, depositing layers of dead plants and animals in its wake.

During and DePalma spent 10 days in the field uncovering fossils of several paddlefish and species related to modern sturgeon. The most amazing site I have ever worked on was this one. There was a fossil all around me.

DePalma was asked by During to send her the samples she had dug up. He sent a partial paddlefish fossil that he had excavated. X-ray images of the fossils were taken at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. The shards of glass found in the x-rays were remnants of the shower of molten rock that would have rained down. The paper by DePalma and colleagues was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The fact that spherules were found in the fish's gills suggested that the animals died after the impact. The fossils gave clues to the catastrophe. When the animals meet their end, the thin layer of bone cells on their fins begin to become more dense, and the x-rays show it. When paddlefish eat more zooplankton rich in carbon-13, their fin bones have elevated levels of carbon-13.

She shared a copy of her master's thesis with DePalma. She began to prepare a journal article after receiving a Dutch award for her thesis. During says she tried to get DePalma to join her paper but he wouldn't. She listed DePalma as the study's second author when she submitted her manuscript to Nature.

Their interactions are characterized differently by DePalma. He says his team came up with the idea of using fossils' isotopic signals to hunt for evidence of the asteroid impact's season long ago. According to DePalma, one of his colleagues advised him to include his name as a co-author in the paper. DePalma said his team invited During's team to join his study. He says that they submitted their paper during the discussion of the options.

In August of 2021, DePalma submitted his paper to Scientific Reports with a different team of authors. The content of the study was not affected by the paper. Manning didn't respond to Science's request for comment on the paper.

Manual transcription process

When DePalma's paper was published three months later, she noticed some discrepancies in the figures, and she was concerned that the authors had not published their data. She shared her concerns. He suggested that she write a letter to Scientific Reports. She took DePalma out of her own manuscript and put it under review.

In a 6 January letter to the journal editor handling his manuscript, DePalma acknowledged that the line graphs in his paper were plotted by hand, as is the norm in the field. The data was supplied as a non-digital data set by an archaeology professor at Miami Dade College who died last year. The "manual transcription process" resulted in some regrettable instances in which data points deviated from the correct values but "none of these examples changed the overall geometry of the plotted lines or affected their interpretation." McKinney's "non-digital data set is viable for research work and remains within normal tolerances for usage"

McKinney would have had to perform the isotope analyses at another facility if Miami Dade did not have an operational mass spectrometry. McKinney never collaborated with laboratories at other institutions according to Sacasa. Sacasa doesn't believe that the man went to another lab because he was sick for a long time.

DePalma didn't give an answer when asked where McKinney did his analyses. He sent a document to Science that he said was from McKinney. There are scans of tables with the data from the fish fossils. The data in the tables is not the same as the data in the methods section, but it has been verified by two people.

The data supplied by DePalma was reviewed by Landman and Cochran after Scientific Reports requested more clarification on the issues raised by During and Ahlberg. The format of the data does not seem unusual. End users who contract for isotope analyses from a lab that does them rarely get raw machine data.

Cochran says that DePalma made a mistake in not including these data and their origins in his original manuscript, but that he has no reason to distrust the basic data.

This is something Eiler disagrees with. He says that if the data were generated in a stable lab, they should be available. The files were almost certainly backed up and the lab must have some kind of record keeping process that says what was done when.

Barbi isn't impressed. The data seems to have been left out of the manuscript. It was an intentional omission which led me to question the credibility of the data. According to Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, there is a simple way for the DePalma team to address these concerns.

According to an email forwarded to Science, the editor handling DePalma's paper at Scientific Reports responded to During and Ahlberg for the first time. After Science inquired about the case, the email said their concerns remained under investigation.

The response doesn't satisfy the people who want the paper to be withdrawn. Eiler concurs. He says that if he were the editor, he would pull the paper. The journal editors have the right to request the source data, says independent scientist Mike Rossner. There are many precedents for the removal of scholarly articles from the internet if they are not forthcoming.