In 2020, amid the first pandemic lockdowns, a scientific conference scheduled to take place in India never happened.
But a group of geologists who were already on site decided to make the most of their time and visited the Bhimbetka Rock Shelters, a series of caves with ancient cave art near Bhopal, India. There, they spotted the fossil of Dickinsonia, a flat, elongated and primitive animal from before complex animals evolved. It marked the first-ever discovery of Dickinsonia in India.
The animal lived 550 million years ago, and the find seemed to settle once and for all the surprisingly controversial age of the rocks making up much of the Indian subcontinent. The find attracted the attention of The New York Times, The Weather Channel and the scientific journal Nature as well as many Indian newspapers.
Only, it turns out, the "fossil" was a case of mistaken identity. The true culprit? Bees.
University of Florida researchers traveled to the site last year and discovered the object had seemingly decayed significantly – quite unusual for a fossil. What's more, giant bee's nests populate the site, and the mark spotted by the scientists in 2020 closely resembled the remains of these large hives.
[...] Gregory Retallack, professor emeritus at the University of Oregon and lead author of the original paper, says he and his co-authors agree with Meert's findings that the object is really just a beehive. They are submitting a comment in support of the new paper to the journal.
This kind of self-correction is a bedrock principle of the scientific method. But the reality is that admitting errors is hard for scientists to do, and it doesn't happen often.
[...] Correcting the fossil record puts the age of the rocks back into contention. Because the rock formation doesn't have any fossils from a known time period, dating it can be difficult.
Journal Reference:
Joseph Meert et al., Stinging News: 'Dickinsonia' discovered in the Upper Vindhyan of India not worth the buzz, Gondwana Research, 117, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gr.2023.01.003
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 14, @03:09AM (2 children)
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 14, @03:32AM
India and science do not mix. Corrupt, class-ridden, bureaucratic and morally flexible - and the Indians are even worse ;)
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday April 15, @05:50AM
Some aspects of science are highly politicised in India, in particular there's a bunch of sloppy science through to outright pseudoscience intended to support BJP ideology, for example one of the things they like doing via "science" is manipulating the historical record ("India invented electron microscopes in 3,000BC!"). The equivalent in the US is "science" designed to support corporate agendas, in India it's political ones. With the evidence currently available it's not possible to tell whether it was an honest mistake or science serving the ends of the BJP.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 14, @12:16PM
Makes one wonder about fossil evidence in general.