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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

What once appeared as a fossil of the primitive animal Dickinsonia turned out to be nothing more than a decaying beehive [ufl.edu]:

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 [sciencedirect.com], 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 [doi.org]

Original Submission