Predeceased by his son, Richard, Jr. on the same day due to Covid, brother Robert, parents Salvatore and Mayme DePalma, many aunts, uncles, and cousins Dennis and Michael DePalma. As we strolled around the site, I noticed on DePalmas belt a long fixed-blade knife and a sheathed bayoneta Second World War relic that his uncle gave him when he was twelve, he said. Study leader Robert DePalma (right) and field assistant Kylie Ruble stabilize a fossil slab with plaster bandages before removing it from the ground. Leave your condolences to the family on this memorial page or send flowers to show you care. One day sixty-six million years ago, life on Earth almost came to a shattering end. In 1902, Barnum Brown, a flamboyant dinosaur hunter who worked at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, found the first Tyrannosaurus rex here, causing a worldwide sensation. Barbara S. DePalma, 87, of Jackson passed away peacefully at her home on Tuesday, July 12, 2022 surrounded by her loved ones. Browse Obituaries and Death Records in Pennsylvania Select a city or town in Pennsylvania from the alphabetized list below. Obituary of Richard S. DePalma, Sr. Irondequoit: Friday, August 13, 2021 at age 88. In that moment, the Cretaceous period ended and the Paleogene period began. When I encountered this damn thing, I immediately understood the importance of it. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. But, in the late nineteen-seventies, a young geologist named Walter Alvarez and his father, Luis Alvarez, a nuclear physicist, discovered that the KT layer was laced with unusually high amounts of the rare metal iridium, which, they hypothesized, was from the dusty remains of an asteroid impact. The history of paleontology is full of tales of bribery, backstabbing, and double-dealing. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. The site appeared to contain microtektites by the million. Deciphering what happened on the day of destruction is crucial not only to solving the three-metre problem but also to explaining our own genesis as a species. When the mosquitoes got bad, DePalma took out a briar pipe and packed it with Royal Cherry Cavendish tobacco. All of it was quickly entombed and preserved in the muck: dying and dead creatures, both marine and freshwater; plants, seeds, tree trunks, roots, cones, pine needles, flowers, and pollen; shells, bones, teeth, and eggs; tektites, shocked minerals, tiny diamonds, iridium-laden dust, ash, charcoal, and amber-smeared wood. Additional fossils, including this beautifully preserved fish tail, have been found at the Tanis site in North Dakota. The first fossil feathers ever found at Hell Creek. Four years earlier, in Hell Creek, he and a field assistant, Robert Feeney, found an odd, lumpy growth of fossilized bone that turned out to be two fused vertebrae from the tail of a hadrosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur from the Cretaceous period. An hour later, he had chiselled all the way around the fish, leaving it encased in matrix, supported by a four-inch-tall pedestal of rock. May God give you strength and comfort during this sad time. But, without federal support for his work, he must cover almost all the costs himself. Robert was born in Phila, PA and had been a lifetime resident of Atco, NJ. He was a member of the GAC and Amici D'Oro. Normally, one geological layer might represent thousands or millions of years. Another paddlefish came to light; it later proved to be nearly six feet long. Utah. Mysteries abound above and below the KT layer. How the Biggest Fraud in German History Unravelled. Later, DePalma would store it behind a friends ranch house, where all his jacketed fossils from the season were laid out in rows, covered with tarps. The main competing hypothesis is that the colossal Deccan volcanic eruptions, in what would become India, spewed enough sulfur and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to cause a climatic shift. It was a tektite, about three millimetres in diameterthe fallout from an ancient asteroid impact. This is Cretaceous flypaper, he said. In the early 1980s, the discovery of a clay layer rich in iridium, an element found in meteorites, at the very end of the rock record of the Cretaceous at sites around the world led researchers to link an asteroid to the End Cretaceous mass extinction. Go to www.aspca.org/donate or call 1-800-628-0028. Using the tooth, he could conduct a stable-isotope study to find out what the animal atewhat the menu was after the disaster, he said. Robert was born in Hoboken, NJ and resided in Old Bridge before moving to Monroe Twp . The days of skulduggery in paleontology have not passed; DePalma was deeply concerned that the site would be expropriated by a major museum. The American market is awash in fossils illegally smuggled out of China and Mongolia. A private gathering will be held to honor his memory. Richards recalled that the 2011 Japanese earthquake produced bizarre, five-foot seiche waves in an absolutely calm Norwegian fjord thirty minutes after the quake, in a place unreachable by the tsunami. The executive . I was so skeptical after the talk I was convinced it was a fabrication. Johnson, who had been mapping the KT layer in Hell Creek, said that his research indicated that Tanis was at least forty-five feet below the KT boundary and perhaps a hundred thousand years older. Robert was a loving Great Grandfather. He was predeceased by his parents, James and Anne DePalma and a sister, Delores . Standard text messaging rates apply. Deposits of Chicxulub tektites are rare; the best source, discovered in 1990, is a small outcrop in Haiti, on a cliff above a road cut. This matches, he said. (There are eight other co-authors.) Privacy Policy, Fort Myers Memorial Gardens With this deposit, we can chart what happened the day the Cretaceous died. No paleontological site remotely like it had ever been found, and, if DePalmas hypothesis proves correct, the scientific value of the site will be immense. This dinosaur had feathers on its forearms. Plant fossils from the first several million years after the impact show almost no signs of such damage; the insects were mostly gone. Although rebuilding a skeleton from thousands of bone fragments that have commingled with those of other species is not easy, DePalma was mortified by the attacks. Monroe Township, NJ. He believes that the jaw belonged to a marsupial that looked like a weasel. Wyoming. A new era of strength competitions is testing the limits of the human body. Shelly Craig, 62 years old, currently living in Paoli, OK. Shelly Craig's phone number is (405) 331 - 0305. This fact, if true, renders the site even more fabulous than previously thought. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil. He turned back to the block on his table and held a magnifying lens up to the tektite. This was not a paleontological question; it was a problem of geophysics and sedimentology. A field assistant, Rudy Pascucci, left, and the paleontologist Robert DePalma, right, at DePalmas dig site. 20, 2018. Trapped inside were two impact particlesanother landmark discovery, because the amber would have preserved their chemical composition. Please share a memory of Robert to include in a keepsake book for family and friends. As more of it was exposed, we could clearly see that the fishs two-foot-long snout had broken when it was forcedprobably by the floods surgeagainst the branches of a submerged araucaria tree. Carlos Villegas Jr., 23, of the 1500 block of West Jefferson Avenue, Naperville, was arrested on a warrant at 11:49 p.m. Feb. 19 in the 1500 block of West Jefferson Avenue. A core sample from DePalmas site. The following day, DePalma noticed a small disturbance preserved in the sediment. You see skin, you see dorsal fins literally sticking straight up in the sediments, species new to science, he said. Devoted father of Kerry Leigh Portilla and her husband Fabian, Joshua Robert DePalma and Jaime Lynn DePalma. He holds the unpaid position of curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History, a nascent and struggling museum with no exhibition space. The eruptions, which began before the KT impact and continued after it, were among the biggest in Earths history, lasting hundreds of thousands of years, and burying half a million square miles of the Earths surface a mile deep in lava. He scraped smooth a vertical section and misted it with water from a spray bottle to bring out the color. No. Time to plaster, he said. Robert was born in Phila, PA and had been a lifetime resident of Atco, NJ. Extraordinary discoveries require extraordinary evidence, he said. And now look at this., From the lab table, he grabbed a fossil forearm belonging to Dakotaraptor, the dinosaur species hed discovered in Hell Creek. It is truly a magnificent site, he wrote to me, adding that its surely one of the best sites ever found for telling just what happened on the day of the impact.. Robert was born in Hoboken, NJ and resided in Old Bridge before moving to . DePalma thought that the bone might have grown around a foreign object and encased it. Instead, everything had been deposited in a single flood. (Anthonys son, Roberts cousin, is the film director Brian De Palma. He is the beloved son of mother, Carolyn and father, Robert. A few years ago, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the worlds most powerful computers, the so-called Q Machine, to model the effects of the impact. Fossils are a big business; wealthy collectors pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions, for a rare specimen. ), Between the ages of three and four, I made a visual connection with the gracefulness of individual bones and how they fit together as a system, DePalma told me. Edit Search New Search. DEPALMA Robert Michael DePalma Jr. of Columbus, Ohio passed away unexpectedly February 15, 2010 at the age of 26 years. Read More, DePalma, Robert V. Las Vegas, NV: Peacefully, April 13, 2017, in Las Vegas, Nevada. But I was intrigued enough to get on a plane to North Dakota to see for myself. Yet scientists know very little about the animals and plants that were living at the time, and as a result they have been searching for fossil deposits as close to the KT boundary as possible. I got in, and we drove for an hour or so, turning through a ranch gate and following a maze of bone-rattling roads that eventually petered out in a grassy basin. He straightened up. Expand the Memories and Condolences form. Johnson, too, finds the lack of transparency, and the dramatic aspects of DePalmas personality, unnerving. He worked for Formigli Brothers in Berlin from 1952 - 1987 and Waterford Twp. Every memory left on the online obituary will be automatically included in this book. In 1890, the New York Herald began a series of sensational articles about the controversy with the headline Scientists Wage Bitter Warfare. The rivalry has since become known as the Bone Wars. Dear brother Read More, Submit an obit for publication in any local newspaper and on Legacy. The discoveries hinted at an extraordinary conclusion that he wasnt quite ready to accept. The timing was all wrong. On Nov. 29, 1958, in Lima, he married Janet Daley, who survives. This tree was alive when it was buried, he said. But as soon as DePalma started digging he noticed grayish-white specks in the layers which looked like grains of sand but which, under a hand lens, proved to be tiny spheres and elongated droplets. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this vagabond debris still harbored living microbes. The world that emerged after the impact was a much simpler place. And they werent scavenged, because whatever would have dug them up afterward was probably gone. He chipped away around the paddlefish, exposing a fin bone, then a half-dollar-size patch of fossilized skin with the scales perfectly visible. A commercial collector had tried to remove it years earlier; it had been abandoned in place and was crumbling from years of exposure. 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