The Current Big Fight in Paleontology
Alvarez Hypothesis, Asteroid, Dinosaur Extinction, Melanie During, Paleontology, Robert DePalma
Now adversaries, Robert DePalma and Melanie During once dug fossils together.
Sayre’s Law contends that: “Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”
New York Magazine has an interesting, gossipy story about academics feuding over competition for credit for a new theory of the cause of dinosaur extinction.
The field of paleontology is mean. It has always been mean. It is, in the words of Uppsala University professor Per Ahlberg, “a honeypot of narcissists.” It is “a snake pit of personality disorders.” “An especially nasty area of academia,” the Field Museum’s Jingmai O’Connor calls it. Among the subfields, nastiness correlates with the size and carnivorousness of the creature under study, the comity possible among those who study ammonites being unlikely among those who study T. rex. A “social experimenter with a penchant for sadism” is how his biographer describes Sir Richard Owen, the man who coined the term dinosaur. The first two famous American paleontologists, the prickly academic Othniel Marsh and the gentleman naturalist Edward Cope, savaged each other in print, hired spies and counterspies, destroyed fossils, and generally worked harder to humiliate each other than to describe the boxes and boxes and boxes of remains they pulled from the extraordinarily rich fossil beds of the American West.
It would take years for the ten days During and DePalma spent together to spin into a scandal that consumed both of them. She would accuse him of research misconduct and fabricating data. He would accuse her of plagiarism and defamation.
