Arts & Entertainment

The Bitter Feud Inside the Paleontology World

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In 2021, a young, unknown pink-haired Dutch paleontologist named Melanie During made an explosive allegation about a fellow paleontologist named Robert DePalma, who controls one of the most important fossil sites in the world. Both had recently emerged with history-making papers that pinpointed the season the dinosaurs died 66 million years ago: It was North America’s spring. But DePalma, During claimed, in his haste to publish first, had stolen her methods and fabricated data. DePalma said it was During who was the thief and a plagiarist to boot. In this masterful work of reporting and writing, New York’s Kerry Howley takes us through the dispute that’s riven the paleontology world, exposing a “snake pit of personality disorders,” in the words of one researcher, under a veneer of scientific politesse.

—Christopher Cox, features editor, New York 

The Asteroid-in-Spring Hypothesis Two paleontologists have turned on each other, each claiming to have found new evidence about the worst day on Earth. 

Photo: Jackson Leibach
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