According to During, DePalma was supposed to be an author on the paper. According DePalma, they had brief discussions to collaborate, but ultimately decided not to.
It doesn't matter because if the article is correct, it's on him to produce the raw data, there is no need to speculate. As it is, the story is fishy in every sense of the word and definitely warrants an investigation.
Apparently he doesn't have the data anymore. According to the article, independent third parties did see the data and didn't think it was suspicious. The implication of what you are saying is that if you lose data for any reason then you're automatically guilty of data forgery. Obviously that's not a great precedent to set.
It's a recently published paper, barely a few months old. Conveniently when questioned he claimed the analysis had been done years ago by someone who's now dead and the raw data is lost. I don't know about yourself but I have copies of all the raw data for everything I ever published, simply because that's the sort of stuff a researcher would naturally keep. Of course, the story could theoretically have happened as he says but it's quite the coincidence that this specific data set is now found to be irrecoverably lost after he's accused of fraud.
Simply using Occam's razor in the absence of better evidence. Which is on those making the claim to produce, you can't just publish papers and then go "I've done the isotopic analyses, trust me bro". Researchers could make up anything then, there needs to be accountability. At the very least his team needs to retract the paper.
You've conveniently omitted the independent third-parties that had seen the data. It's a messy world. Unexpected things happen. How do these third-parties factor in to Occam's razor? You need to add more parameters to your explanation as to why the third-parties would verify the existence of non-existent data.
Here's another possibility: During goes to DePalma to collaborate and asks if DePalma still has the data. DePalma says he doesn't. During sees this an an opportunity to claim credit for the work.
It's impossible to tell which scenario is more likely. Are you really willing to ruin someone's career over purely circumstantial evidence provided by a biased witness?
I suspect that you either did not read the article posted here or that you are ignoring relevant parts of it when you reply in this thread for reasons known only to yourself. Perhaps you should state your relationship to During and DePalma so others can judge whether there is a conflict of interest here.
In a reply further down you pose this scenario, though the evidence against it is covered in the story that it appears you didn't read.
>Here's another possibility: During goes to DePalma to collaborate and asks if DePalma still has the data. DePalma says he doesn't. During sees this an an opportunity to claim credit for the work.
From the article it is clear that she used her own data from samples that she collected (she is credited in DePalma's acknowledgements) and that he shipped to her so that she could study them and she attempted to get him to be a co-author on her paper but he declined and instead, he assembled a paper that to reviewers looked to be a bit haphazardly assembled.
From the article - DePalma's paper:
>Several independent scientists consulted about the case by Science agreed the Scientific Reports paper contains suspicious irregularities, and most were surprised that the paper—which they note contains typos, unresolved proofreader’s notes, and several basic notation errors—was published in the first place. Although they stopped short of saying the irregularities clearly point to fraud, most—but not all—said they are so concerning that DePalma’s team must come up with the raw data behind its analyses if team members want to clear themselves.
From the article - During's work:
>After she returned to Amsterdam, During asked DePalma to send her the samples she had dug up, mostly sturgeon fossils. He did so, and later also sent a partial paddlefish fossil he had excavated himself. During obtained extremely high-resolution x-ray images of the fossils at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France. The x-rays revealed tiny bits of glass called spherules—remnants of the shower of molten rock that would have been thrown from the impact site and rained down around the world.
It is reasonable to conclude from the text that During collected samples, had them independently analyzed, and that her analyses resulted in the discovery of the spherules lodged in the gills that helped cement this site as contemporaneous with the Chicxulub impact. The 2019 paper that DePalma and others, including Melanie During's mentor, Jan Smit co-authored with him became the basis for the movie narrated by David Attenborough. It put him in the spotlight, which appears from the various posts available on Twitter and Reddit to be something that feeds his needs.
As to others wondering how as a grad student he could come to control access to the site it is worth noting that one of the people he thanks in his acknowledgements is his Dad who is an orthodontist and who, it may be implied, could be the source for the funding needed to secure access to the Tanis site.
If it was my kid and they were needing to buy something to help them complete their studies then my wallet would open. I expect his Dad feels the same way.
I do not know either of these people and strongly suspect that in the end, we will all know more about them than we ever wanted to know.
I am glad that they were able to gather the samples, complete the analyses, compile the supporting data from multiple lines of inquiry to bolster the case for Tanis being contemporaneous with Chicxulub. I'm a geophysicist who likes geosciences.