Obituary. A funeral liturgy will be celebrated at 12:00pm at Immaculate Conception RC Church Spotswood. DePalma said, This fish was likely alive for some time after being caught in the wave, long enough to gasp frenzied mouthfuls of water in a vain attempt to survive.. Study leader Robert DePalma (right) and field assistant Kylie Ruble stabilize a fossil slab with plaster bandages before removing it from the ground. Signup today! Peering through the lens, DePalma picked away at the block with a dental probe. Gabby Steele scored the opening goal for Branson in . He unwrapped a sixteen-inch fossil feather, and held it in his palms like a piece of Lalique glass. Today, the layer of debris, ash, and soot deposited by the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earths sediment as a stripe of black about the thickness of a notebook. I squeak by, he said. The asteroid had likely struck in the fall, DePalma speculated. Lou served in the Army during the Korean War. Arthur was born October 10, 1937 in Chicago, IL to Arthur R. DePalma and Edith (Ponzi) DePalma. You can still show your support by sending flowers directly to the family, or planting a memorial tree in memory of Robert DePalma. Several paleontologists I talked to had not heard of him. Other paleontologists told me that they were leery of going on the record with criticisms of DePalma and his co-authors. Send simple, comforting meals with Home Chef. I went after whatever on the dinner table had bones in it. His family buried their dead pets in one spot and put the burial markers in another, so that he wouldnt dig up the corpses; he found them anyway. For five years, DePalma continued excavations at the site. Bob was born in Newark, NJ on December 26, 1948 to the late James and Rose DePalma. If youre in charge of handling the affairs for a recently deceased loved one, this guide offers a helpful checklist. Robert Smith. He showed me a photo of the amber seen through a microscope. Most of its layers were horizontal, but a few formed curlicues or flamelike patterns called truncated flame structures, which were caused by a combination of weight from above and mini-surges in the incoming water. He took it to Lawrence Memorial Hospital, in Kansas, where a CT technician scanned it for free in the middle of the night, when the machine was idle. He could have stumbled on something amazing, but he has a reputation for making a lot out of a little. As an example, he brought up DePalmas paper on Dakotaraptor, which he described as bones he basically collected, all in one area, some of which were part of a dinosaur, some of which were part of a turtle, and he put it all together as a skeleton of one animal. He also objected to what he felt was excessive secrecy surrounding the Tanis site, which has made it hard for outside scientists to evaluate DePalmas claims. The three-metre gap below the KT layer, proponents argued, was evidence that the mass extinction was well under way by the time of the asteroid strike. 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. 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. Robert was born in Phila, PA and had been a lifetime resident of Atco, NJ. Its more parsimonious to suggest it was a known dinosaur, most likely a theropod, possibly a raptor. He kept digging. Results 1-20 of 34 View Record Name Birth Date Death Date Publication Place Relatives; To get better results, add more information such as Birth Info, Death Info or Locationeven a guess will help. All expressed a desire to see the final paper, which will be published next week, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, so that they could evaluate the data for themselves. Lower down, it graded into a more turbulent band of sand and gravel, which contained the heavier fish fossils, bones, and bigger tektites. and those are my deepest, most intimate feelings about our friendship., DePalmas thesis adviser estimated that the site will keep specialists busy for half a century. 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. Robert P. DePalma Obituary Remember Robert P. DePalma. But DePalma was able to show that each layer in the deposit had been laid down in a single big rainstorm. You have funeral questions, we have answers. "Sonny" DePalma, 77, died at 1:30 p.m. Jan. 28, 2012, at his residence in Lima, surrounded by his loving wife and family. He noted that every fish hed found in the site had died with its mouth open, which may indicate that the fish had been gasping as they suffocated in the sediment-laden water. witte museum reciprocity; chewing tobacco npo guidelines; chris horton barbridge He had served on its board since 1979. A unique and lasting . Because the soft tissue had also fossilized, he said, even the animals stomach contents might still be present. Beloved Husband of Judith Elizabeth DePalma. Check other contact information for Shelly Craig. Results 1-20 of 24 View Record Name Birth Date Death Date Publication Place Relatives; To get better results, add more information such as Birth Info, Death Info or Locationeven a guess will help. He found his first dinosaur bone when he was nine, in Colorado. DePalma was a scientific nobody, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kansas, and he said that he had found the site with no institutional backing and no collaborators. I used to visit him every other weekend and show him my latest finds, DePalma said. Virginia. I am thinking of you and praying for you both. Im convinced these are dinosaur feathers. Back in the lab, he would go through this surface to access the fossil, with the plaster jacket acting as a cradle below. Wyoming. Ammonite, he said. I never want to go through that again, he told me. Another paddlefish came to light; it later proved to be nearly six feet long. He put a lighter to it and vigorously puffed, wreathing himself in sickly-sweet smoke, then went back to work. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. We could see when there were buds on the trees, he told me. Im pretty sure this is a species new to science, he said. It started as a tunnel at the top of the KT layer, went down, and then widened into a round cavity, filled with soil of a different color, which stopped at the hard sandstone of the undisturbed bedrock layer below. Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Over millions of years, the Hell Creek layer has been heavily eroded, leaving only remnants, which jut from the prairie like so many rotten teeth. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. The asteroid struck a shallow sea where the Yucatn peninsula is today. Please select what you would like included for printing: Copy the text below and then paste that into your favorite email application. The KT event continues to attract the interest of scientists in no small part because the ashen print it left on the planet is an existential reminder. Leave your condolences to the family on this memorial page or send flowers to show you care. Each day's obituaries, delivered to your inbox. Funeral homes; Help and advice. The site is now under exclusive long-term lease.). DePalma was lost in another day, in another time. The first fossil feathers ever found at Hell Creek. In an article in Science, published in 1980, they proposed that this impact was so large that it triggered the mass extinction, and that the KT layer was the debris from that event. Because of the extreme fragility of the fossils, he would take them back to his lab, in Florida, totally encased in sediment, or matrix. In the lab, he would free each fossil under a magnifying glass, in precisely controlled conditions, away from the damaging effects of sun, wind, and aridity. The Hell Creek Formation spanned the Cretaceous and the Paleogene periods, and paleontologists had known for at least half a century that an extinction had occurred then, because dinosaurs were found below, but never above, the KT layer. When DePalmas find was picked up by the national media, Horner dismissed it as speculation and merely one data point. He suggested an alternative scenario: the T.rex might have accidentally bitten the tail of a sleeping hadrosaur, thinking that it was dead, and then backed away when it realized its mistake. We werent just near the KT boundarythis whole site is the KT boundary! From surveying and mapping the layers, DePalma hypothesized that a massive inland surge of water flooded a river valley and filled the low-lying area where we now stood, perhaps as a result of the KT-impact tsunami, which had roared across the proto-Gulf and up the Western Interior Seaway. she was the loving mother of Debra (Heenan) DePalma and Donny Heenan, Jr., the cherished grandmother of Donny Heenan, III, Lauren Heenan, Janelle, Heenan and Adrienne Heenan; the dear sister of the late Robert Moschella, Sr. and the treasured aunt of Corrine Perkins, Robert Moschella, Jr. and Stephen . This is the last day of the Cretaceous. For fine work, DePalma uses X-Acto knives and brushesthe typical tools of a paleontologistas well as dental instruments given to him by his father. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. His face was tanned from long days in the sun and he had a five-day-old beard. The pick was given to him by David Burnham, his thesis adviser at Kansas, when he completed his masters degree. (In 1997, a T.rex nicknamed Sue was sold at a Sothebys auction, to the Field Museum of Natural History, in Chicago, for more than $8.3 million.) Funeral services will begin at 11:15 a.m. on . The brutal shaking would have been enough to trigger a large seiche, and the first blobs of glass would have started to rain down seconds or minutes afterward. Before joining Rockwell, Mr. dePalma had been a vice president at the Pittsburgh National Bank. Similar formations, caused by hailstones hitting a muddy surface, had been found before in the fossil record. Smit was a sedimentologist, and another researcher whom DePalma shared his data with, Mark Richards, now of the University of Washington, was a geophysicist. DePalma pulled up to my hotel in a Toyota 4Runner, its stereo blasting the theme to Raiders of the Lost Ark. He wore a coarse cotton work shirt, cargo pants with canvas suspenders, and a sude cowboy hat with the left brim snapped up. In 2004, DePalma, at the time a twenty-two-year-old paleontology undergraduate, began excavating a small site in the Hell Creek Formation. Robert is preceded in death by his loving wife Concetta Marie DePalma (2004). DePalma initially dismissed it as trash and decried the irresponsibility of the collector. A longtime resident of Nevada, he retired from the Imperial Read More, Robert L. DePalma AGE: 69 Monroe Robert L. DePalma, 69, died on September 4, 2013 at the Jersey Shore Medical Center. I was never into sports, he said. 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