DePalma had studied under Larry Martin, a world authority on the Cretaceous predecessors of birds, and had been exposed to a lot of fossil feathers. Earths two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. For some people, the best send-off is one that they would have loved to attendthemselves: a big party. For many years, scientists believed that the KT extinction was no great mystery: over millions of years, volcanism, climate change, and other events gradually killed off many forms of life. DePalma had no paperwork to prove his ownership, and a court refused to return his fossils, which numbered in the hundreds. Wisconsin. View Obituary & Service Information By using this website, you accept the use of cookies. He found many complete fish, which are rare in the Hell Creek Formation, and he figured that he could remove them intact if he worked with painstaking care. When sunlight finally broke through the haze, it illuminated a hellish landscape. One by one, he dipped the burlap strips in the plaster and draped them across the top and the sides of the specimen. We wouldnt be here talking on the phone if that meteorite hadnt fallen, Smit told me, with a laugh. The following July, DePalma returned to do a preliminary excavation of the site. The bottom layer was jumbled; the first rush of water had ripped up layers of mud, gravel, and rocks and tumbled them about with pieces of burned (and burning) wood. It is almost beyond credibility that a precise geological transcript of the most important sixty minutes of Earths history could still exist millions of years latera sort of high-speed, high-resolution video of the event recorded in fine layers of stone. Loving son of William and Doris DePalma. In one fell swoop, DePalma may have filled in the gap in the fossil record. But the over-all view is consistently grim. Cleveland, Bob was born in Newark, NJ on December 26, 1948 to the late James and Rose DePalma.He is survived by his loving wife, Lisa DePalma of Fort Myers Beach, FL.A Celebration of Life will be held in the future and will be announced via www.fortmyersmemorial.com, 46 files added to the album Memories Album, This site uses cookies to provide you with a great user experience. This was true not only in Hell Creek but all over the world. Field data from a diverse multispecific . The best poems for funerals, memorial services., and cards. The lab was a windowless, wedgelike room in the geology building, lined with bubbling aquarium tanks and shelves heaped with books, scientific journals, pieces of coral, mastodon teeth, seashells, and a stack of .50-calibre machine-gun rounds, dating from the Second World War, that the labs owner had recovered from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Most digs are boring; days or weeks may pass with little found. Every memory left on the online obituary will be automatically included in this book. He soon exposed a section of pink, pearlescent shell, which had been pushed up against the sturgeon. Im pretty sure this is a species new to science, he said. As the water slowed and became slack, it deposited everything that had been caught up in its travelsthe heaviest material first, up to whatever was floating on the surface. This is the jaw of Dougie, he said. Half an hour later, DePalma discovered a large feather. is john boy and billy on xm radio; 2002 etsu football roster; Projetos. Below that layer was a hard surface of sandstone, the original Cretaceous bedrock of the site, much of which had been scoured smooth by the flood. 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. They raided each others quarries, bribed each others crews, and vilified each other in print and at scientific meetings. He was recalled to active duty during the Berlin crisis in 1961 and was discharged a year later with the rank of captain. In college, he was a captain of Duquesne's basketball team, one of the leading basketball teams in the country at that time, and was named an All-American in 1957. 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. Parallel, streaming lines were visible on its surfaceSchlieren lines, formed by two types of molten glass swirling together as the blobs arced through the atmosphere. He had served on its board since 1979. Unless you are experienced as an estate executor, you probably should hire an attorney. Most paleontologists rejected the idea that a sudden, random encounter with space junk had drastically altered the evolution of life on Earth. 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. Forward to Family & Friends; Print; Contact Support; Upgrade; Death Certificates; Share This Obituary. It is extremely confidential and only three others know of it at the moment, all of them close colleagues. He went on, It is far more unique and far rarer than any simple dinosaur discovery. 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. (At the time, a shallow body of water, called the Western Interior Seaway, ran from the proto-Gulf of Mexico up through part of North America.) Prepare a personalized obituary for someone you loved.. He exposed the feather with precise movements. Obituary of Robert L. DePalma. Mars was eventually strewn with the debrisjust as pieces of Mars, knocked aloft by ancient asteroid impacts, have been found on Earth. When he was four, someone at a museum in Texas gave him a fragment of dinosaur bone, which he took to his great-uncle. Today, DePalma, now thirty-seven, is still working toward his Ph.D. Horner argued that T.rex was too slow and lumbering, its arms too puny and its eyesight too poor, to prey on other creatures. Pascucci, a muscular man in his fifties, was sunburned and unshaven, and wore a sleeveless T-shirt, snakeproof camouflage boots, and a dusty Tilley hat. Updated 18 hrs ago; 315 High St . FUNERAL HOME. He was predeceased by his loving wives, Rose Marie Amidon of 43 years and Barbara Sherlock of 13 years, and his brother, Gerald. Beloved husband of Diane (nee Hatch). The tech company Wirecard was embraced by the German lite. 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. Please share a memory of Robert to include in a keepsake book for family and friends. When DePalma first visited the site, he noted, partially embedded on the surface, the hip bone of a dinosaur in the ceratopsian family, of which triceratops is the best-known member. Recently Sold Properties in Winfield 7. Thomas J. DeMarco,Manager,N. J. Lic. Now watch. With precision calipers, he measured the diameter of the quill knobs, then the diameter of the quill of the fossil feather; both were 3.5 millimetres. It looked as though a small animal had dug through the mud to create a hideout. I dont know for sure. Smit was a sedimentologist, and another researcher whom DePalma shared his data with, Mark Richards, now of the University of Washington, was a geophysicist. His father, Robert, Sr., practices endodontic surgery in nearby Delray Beach; his great-uncle Anthony, who died in 2005, at the age of a hundred, was a renowned orthopedic surgeon who wrote several standard textbooks on the subject. He loaned the museum his childhood fossil collection for display, but in 2004 the museum went bankrupt and many of the specimens were carted off to a community college. Terms of Service apply. In the real Tanis, archeologists found an inscription in three writing systems, which, like the Rosetta stone, was crucial in translating ancient Egyptian. Most died in a vertical position in the sediment, didnt even tip over on their sides, he said. The site appeared to contain microtektites by the million. 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. My deepest sympathies to the entire family. The site is now under exclusive long-term lease.). 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. As the court deliberates in 1997, a New York Times pull quote tells readers "[a] euthanasia case becomes a cause clbre in Canada" (DePalma 1997, p. A3). This says a feather of this size would be associated with a limb of this size.. In the late Cretaceous, widespread volcanoes spewed vast quantities of gas and dust into the atmosphere, and the air contained far higher levels of carbon dioxide than the air that we breathe now. He began shovelling off the layers of soil above where hed found the fish. A commercial collector had tried to remove it years earlier; it had been abandoned in place and was crumbling from years of exposure. Gusts of wind stirred up clouds of dust, and rain fell; when the weather cleared, the late-afternoon sun spilled across the prairie. The fish were encased in layers of damp, cracked mud and sand that had never solidified; it was so soft that it could be dug with a shovel or pulled apart by hand. Study leader Robert DePalma (right) and field assistant Kylie Ruble stabilize a fossil slab with plaster bandages before removing it from the ground. It is the Lagersttte of the KT extinction., Jan Smit, a paleontologist at Vrije University, in Amsterdam, and a world authority on the KT impact, has been helping DePalma analyze his results, and, like Burnham and Walter Alvarez, he is a co-author of a scientific paper that DePalma is publishing about the site. In a century and a half of assiduous searching, almost no dinosaur remains have been found in the layers three metres, or about nine feet, below the KT boundary, a depth representing many thousands of years. In 2004, DePalma, at the time a twenty-two-year-old paleontology undergraduate, began excavating a small site in the Hell Creek Formation. Robert A Depalma; This research examines a Konzentrat-Lagersttte, the Bone Butte site, in the Upper Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota. 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. But when the dinosaurs were gone it freed them, DePalma said. Loving Father of Anthony DePalma, Pamela DePalma, Rebecca Soldan, Heather Beckett, and Linda Beckett. He treated these by saturating them with his own special blend of hardener. Devoted father of Kerry Leigh Portilla and her husband Fabian, Joshua Robert DePalma and Jaime Lynn DePalma. He peered at it, his eyes inches from the rock, probing it with the tip of the bayonet. Enter your phone number above to have directions sent via text. He added rope handles and plastered them in. As DePalma uncovered more of the shell, I watched its vibrant color fade. 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. He was 56 years old and lived in Mount Lebanon, Pa. Mr. dePalma died of cancer . Phillip Robert DePalma of Holmdel/Keyport passed away on December 27th. (Anthonys son, Roberts cousin, is the film director Brian De Palma. The crater and the asteroid were named Chicxulub, after a small Mayan town near the epicenter. 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