An instant classic
On feuds and dinosaurs
If you read a lot of science writing, you might not read New York. And if you read New York, you might not read a lot of science writing. This week we have a crossover for the ages: “The Asteroid-in-Spring Hypothesis,” about the North Dakota site that might be one of the most significant discoveries in paleontology if the majority of the field could get a clear look at it, and the scientists feuding over access and discoveries there. The site is called Tanis, which you might remember from a 2019 New Yorker feature that remains the most comprehensive presentation of the place. According to some paleontologists, including Robert DePalma, the perpetual grad student who controls the site, Tanis abounds with the fossil remains of ancient fish and other creatures killed in a flood initiated by the asteroid impact that drove the dinosaurs extinct. All other paleontologists are like, amazing! Can we also see the most important fossils discovered in decades if not ever? And thus far, DePalma, somewhat inexplicably, has been like, no.
The particular feud explored in the story goes beyond just access to Tanis and is being fought between two believers, DePalma and Melanie During, over who had the idea and did the necessary research to discover the season of the asteroid impact (spring, they both think). It’s fascinating, but the science isn’t really what makes the story good. First, the sources on all sides—even the ones whose motivations and overall trustworthiness remain murky—all appear to have been totally emotionally transparent with reporter Kerry Howley, and it’s an incredible feat of character building within a story of having, and being, a professional nemesis. Second, there’s the hilarious and surprising portrait of paleontology as, in the immortal words of one of its denizens, “a snake pit of personality disorders.”
A lot of relatively small scientific fields are like this; spending decades arguing with the only five to ten people in the world who understand your work, but also inevitably think it’s fundamentally flawed, will eventually turn anyone into a paranoid narcissist. Usually that’s the stuff that stays in a reporter’s notes, the unfortunate reality you have to work around to get to the story you want to tell. Here, it is the story, and it’s delightful. My favorite anecdote, from when geologist Water Alvarez, among others, was searching for asteroid impact crater, the final evidence he needed to prove his extinction hypothesis:
In fact, the crater had already been found, in the Yucatán, by a gregarious, eccentric oil-seeking PEMEX geophysicist named Glen Penfield. Penfield noted anomalies in a magnetic field, charted it with paper and a pencil, found a circle the size of Connecticut, and surmised, before anyone else, that he had found the crater in question. He called Walter Alvarez, left a message, and got no response. (“A mediocre geologist,” Penfield calls him now.) He tried telling NASA and was rebuffed. He had been trying to share the news about it for a decade, but the attitude, according to Penfield, was “This kid doesn’t even have a doctorate” and it’s “not worth talking to some oil guy.” He spent a considerable amount of time, he told me, depressed that no one would hear him, not even a mediocre geologist whose reputation hinged on this very information. He named the crater Chicxulub specifically “to give the academics and NASA naysayers a challenging time pronouncing it after a decade of their dismissals.” Yucatán Crater would have been too easy for them.
Read it all here! And here’s a photo of my late dog and me in the town of Chicxulub, at the very homemade monument commemorating the asteroid impact.
