• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

“Fossil” That Rewrote Indian Geologic History Is Actually A Very Recent Beehive

February 2, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

Possibly the hardest part of being a good scientist is admitting when you’re wrong – particularly when you are very, very wrong. So full credit to Professor Gregory Retallack of the University of Oregon and team who published a paper that turned out to be wrong by a factor of more than a hundred million, and have now admitted their error.

The further back in time one goes, the harder it is to work out where the continents once lay, but unraveling the mystery is an important part of understanding the Earth’s deep past. So the report in 2020 in the journal Gondwana Research of a fossil that would fill in one of the most important gaps created great excitement, particularly because it came with a story of turning lemons into lemonade.

Advertisement

Alas, a new paper in the same journal has revealed the claim was wrong to a rather spectacular extent, as the authors of the original paper have gracefully acknowledged.

The story began in 2020, when a team of geologists was visiting India to attend a conference. Like so much else that year, the event was canceled, so the team decided not to waste their journey and instead spent time in the (relatively) open air looking at rocks.

The rocks they studied were in the Bhimbetka Rock Shelters, a site near Bhopal known for its sandstone cave art, but whose geological age is uncertain. There the authors reported a Dickinsonia fossil, a primitive animal that has never before been found in India.

Entrance to the Bhimbetka Rock Shelters caves, near Bhopal, Japan

The Bhimbetka Rock Shelters’ entrance. The absence of fossils makes the stones hard to date. Image Credit: Joe Meert

Dickinsonia are regarded as the first animals, but before too long were displaced by more advanced organisms. Its presence would thus indicate the Shelters were laid down around 550 million years ago, with important implications for the age of India in general. The announcement attracted widespread attention in scientific and mainstream media alike.

Advertisement

Sadly, when Professor Joseph Meert of the University of Florida and colleagues visited the same site in December 2022, they noticed this important specimen had degraded. Granted, it would not have been exposed to the air for all the half-billion years since Dickinsonia flourished, but it still seemed odd a fossil would last so long, only to decay so fast.

“As soon as I looked at it, I thought something’s not right here,” Meert said in a statement. “The fossil was peeling off the rock.” On further investigation, Meert realized the specimen was no Dickinsonia, but a hive for giant honeybees, like many others in the area. Rather than having been buried deep in the rock and only exposed recently through erosion, the hive was attached to the surface.

The paper Meert and co-authors have now published pointing this out bears the title. “Stinging News: ‘Dickinsonia’ discovered in the Upper Vindhyan of India not worth the buzz.” Sweeter than honey is a good pun and a paper completed and published in less than two months.

Retallack and co-authors of the original paper are submitting a comment acknowledging their error.

Advertisement

 The question of when the rocks were laid down is unresolved, since many dating methods don’t work with these kinds of sediments. Nevertheless, the new paper points to evidence of an age of around 1,000 million years, nearly double what a real Dickensonia fossil would imply, based on radioactive decay of zircons and magnetic orientation.

Hives like this from the giant honey bees (Apis dorsata) dot the cliffs around the site.

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

Other scientists hold to an age that would make Dickensonia fossils, or some of their unicellular predecessors, plausible.

Anti-science rhetoric likes to point to examples like this to undermine credibility on more politicized topics, for example vaccine safety or climate change. Yet it is the willingness of people like Retallack to admit their mistakes when new evidence emerges that shows science working as it should, even if it is rarer than it should be.

Advertisement

Both the original and new paper are open access in Gondwana Research 

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Social network Peanut expands to include more women with launch of Peanut Menopause
  2. Marketmind: Watch those spiralling gas prices
  3. Thai central bank chief warns economy remains fragile, exposed to shocks
  4. Be On The Cutting-Edge Of Tech With This Top-Rated Learning Bundle

Source Link: “Fossil” That Rewrote Indian Geologic History Is Actually A Very Recent Beehive

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version