Possibly the tough part of being a good scientist is admitting when you ’re wrong – particularly when you are very , very faulty . So full course credit toProfessor Gregory Retallackof the University of Oregon and team who published a newspaper that plough out to be wrong by a factor of more than a hundred million , and have now admitted their error .
The further back in clock time one move , the harder it is to work out where the Continent once lay , but ravel out the whodunit is an significant part of understand the Earth ’s mystifying past . So the account in 2020 in the journalGondwana Researchof a fossil that would fill in one of the most significant gaps create keen excitement , peculiarly because it come with a tarradiddle of turning lemon tree into lemonade .
Alas , a novel newspaper publisher in the same daybook has give away the claim was wrong to a rather spectacular extent , as the authors of the original paper have gracefully acknowledge .
The Bhimbetka Rock Shelters' entrance. The absence of fossils makes the stones hard to date. Image Credit: Joe Meert
The storey began in 2020 , when a squad of geologist was see India to take care a conference . Like so much else that year , the event was canceled , so the squad decided not to waste their journeying and instead pass time in the ( relatively ) open air looking at rocks .
The rock they studied were in the Bhimbetka Rock Shelters , a website near Bhopal screw for its sandstone cave art , but whose geologic age is unsettled . There the generator reported aDickinsonia dodo , a primitive animal that has never before been found in India .
Dickinsonia are consider as thefirst animals , but before too long were displaced by more in advance organisms . Its comportment would thus indicate the Shelters were laid down around 550 million years ago , with important implications for the age of India in general . The promulgation attract widespread tending in scientific and mainstream media alike .
Hives like this from the giant honey bees dot the cliffs around the site, and look like Dickensonia as they age. Image Credit: Joe Meert
unhappily , whenProfessor Joseph Meertof the University of Florida and colleagues visit the same land site in December 2022 , they noticed this authoritative specimen had put down . Granted , it would not have been expose to the melodic line for all the half - billion years since Dickinsonia brandish , but it still seemed odd a fogey would last so long , only to crumble so tight .
" As soon as I looked at it , I thought something ’s not right on here , " Meert allege in astatement . “ The fossil was peeling off the careen . ” On further probe , Meert recognise the specimen was no Dickinsonia , but a hive for giant honeybees , like many others in the region . Rather than having been buried late in the rock ‘n’ roll and only exposed latterly through erosion , the beehive was sequester to the surface .
The composition Meert and Colorado - authors have now published pointing this out bears the title . “ burn News : ‘ Dickinsonia’discovered in the Upper Vindhyan of India not worth the bombilation . ” odorous than love is a good pun and a newspaper completed and put out in less than two months .
Retallack and co - authors of the original paper are submitting a gossip acknowledging their error .
The doubt of when the rocks were lay down is unresolved , since many dating method do n’t work out with these kind of sediments . Nevertheless , the new report points to evidence of an age of around 1,000 million twelvemonth , nearly double what a real Dickensonia fossil would entail , based on radioactive decomposition of zircons and magnetised orientation course .
Other scientist maintain to an old age that would make Dickensonia fossil , or some of their unicellular predecessor , plausible .
Anti - science grandiosity like to signal to examples like this to undermine credibility on more politicized topic , for example vaccine safety or climate change . Yet it is the willingness of people like Retallack to allow in their fault when unexampled evidence emerges that show scienceworking as it should , even if it is rare than it should be .
Both theoriginaland new paper are exposed access inGondwana Research
