Fossils of an extinct species of animal that scientists reported in a sensational discovery from India’s Bhimbetka Rock Shelters in 2021 have been discovered to be a false alarm.
Gregory Retallack, the lead creator of the February 2021 paper that reported the invention, has acknowledged to The New York Times that they’re planning to right their paper after a better have a look at the location revealed the obvious fossil to actually be wax smeared on a rock by a bee hive.
Discrepancies discovered
In March 2020, Dr. Retallack, a professor of palaeontology on the University of Oregon, and another researchers got a tour of the Bhimbetka Rock Shelters, in Madhya Pradesh, by members of the Geological Survey of India once they had flown to India to attend a convention.
There, in accordance to The New York Times, they noticed by likelihood what regarded like a 44-cm-wide fossil of Dickinsonia, an animal that lived not less than 538 million years in the past, in a cave. Dickinsonia fossils in different components of the world have indicated it was round or oval in form, considerably flat, with rib-like buildings radiating from a central column.
Dr. Retallack and his friends took pictures of the rock characteristic, since they weren’t carrying their instruments, and decided them with additional evaluation to be Dickinsonia fossils. They printed a paper describing their findings in February 2021.
But when Joseph Meert, a professor of geology on the University of Florida, visited the identical Bhimbetka cave in December 2022, he discovered some discrepancies with the opposite fossil finds.
Eventually, he was ready to conclude that “the impression resulted from decay of a modern beehive which was attached to a fractured rock surface”, as he wrote in his paper printed in January 2023. When Dr. Retallack was notified of those findings, he determined to have his paper corrected.
Why the confusion?
Suvrat Kher, a sedimentary geologist and likewise a author, speculated three attainable the explanation why the decayed beehive may have been mistaken for a Dickinsonia fossil.
One is that there’s consensus in the group of paleobiologists that the natural world of the Ediacaran interval, 635-530 million years in the past, “represented early animals and macroscopic eukaryotes living in a marine setting”, whereas Dr. Retallack has “long held the view that they are lichen that lived in a terrestrial environment.”
“It happens that the strata at Bhimbetka (Maihar sandstone) is a coastal terrestrial deposit,” Mr. Kher continued. “When their group came across the ‘fossil’ impression, which admittedly looked like Dickinsonia, its sedimentologic context fitted Dr. Retallack’s ideas of where Dickinsonia should be found.”
Second: Dickinsonia is “an iconic member” of the Ediacaran interval and “an important age marker”, because it’s believed to have lived 555-545 million years in the past. So reporting its discovery would have carried “the prestige of a ‘first report’ from India” in addition to solved the puzzle of the age of the Upper Vindhyan rocks. “The temptation could have been there to claim this priority,” Mr. Kher mentioned.
Indeed, when the fossil was believed to be authentic, it urged that the youngest Upper Vindhyan sediments in the Vindhyan Basin have been 540 million years outdated. The rock shelters are positioned in this space. But now that the discovering has been overturned, Meert et al. wrote in their paper, “The age of the Upper Vindhyan … remains contested.”
Third is “the timing,” Mr. Kher mentioned. “The beehive had to have been degraded just the right amount to be mistaken as a fossil. Anything more or less and the resemblance disappears, as has happened in the two years since the report. This ephemeral state is perhaps one reason why others hadn’t noticed it elsewhere.”
‘Quite convincing’
“The case made by Joe Meert and colleagues was quite convincing,” Dr. Retallack informed The Hindu in an e mail. “As you can see, the stakes in terms of age and palaeogeography were not very big. In science we accept mistakes, and acknowledgment of error should not be as rare as it is..”
Dr. Retallack and his coauthors on the paper have additionally submitted a remark supporting Meert et al.’s conclusions to the journal that printed each their papers, Gondwana Research. The remark, but to be printed, begins:
“Meert et al. (2023) have posted a novel and unexpected reinterpretation of remains interpreted by us (Retallack et al., 2021) as fossil Dickinsonia, and argue that it was a modern nest of giant bee ( Apis dorsata). Although the remains had all essential morphological retails of Dickinsonia elongata, that regularity of form was fortuitous, and we agree that it is indeed a modern bee nest and not an Ediacaran fossil.”
Other locations of concern
The Bhimbetka Rock Shelters are well-known for his or her cave work, a few of which have been dated to 8,000 B.C., whereas archaeological proof on the website has indicated human settlements up to 100 millennia in the past. So the Dickinsonia fossil discovering, even when it had been borne out, wouldn’t have been crucial characteristic of the rock shelters.
“In a country where most fossils languish in dusty institutes or museums, it is more likely the fossil would have been extracted,” Devayani Khare, a geoscience author, mentioned. “Even if it were left in place, it wouldn’t rival the prehistoric significance of the rock art.“
Mr. Kher agreed. He added: “It is other places we should be concerned about. For example, rocks from the crucial time period when early animals first diversified (580-500 million years ago) occur only in one place in Peninsular India, in the Marwar basin (Jodhpur area),” he mentioned.
“They also occur in the Lesser Himalaya around Mussorie and Nainital. But these rocks are not in the GSI [Geological Survey of India] geo-heritage site list. Ideally GSI should be more receptive to requests and recommendations by researchers on which sites deserve protection.”
