(ORDO NEWS) — This story began in 2020 when a team of geologists visited India to attend a conference
Like so much else that year, the event was cancelled, so the team decided to spend some time in the (relatively) open air viewing the rocks.
The stones they studied were in the Bhimbetka rock shelters, a site near Bhopal famous for its sandstone cave paintings, but whose geological age is unknown.
There, the authors reported on a fossil of Dickinsonia, a primitive animal never before found in India.
Dickinsonia are considered the first animals, which were soon replaced by more developed organisms.
Thus, its presence indicates that the shelters were laid about 550 million years ago, which has important implications for the age of India as a whole.
The announcement attracted attention in both the scientific community and the media.
Unfortunately, when Professor Joseph Mirt of the University of Florida and colleagues visited the same site in December 2022, they noticed that this important specimen had degraded.
Sure, it hadn’t been exposed to the air for the half-billion years since Dickinsonia flourished, but it still seemed odd that a fossil could exist for so long, only to decay so quickly.
“As soon as I looked at it, I thought something was wrong here,” Mirt stated. “The fossil was breaking away from the rock.”
Upon further investigation, Myrtle realized that the specimen was not a Dickinsonia, but a giant bee hive, like many others in the area.
Instead of being buried deep in the rock, the hive was anchored to the surface and only recently eroded.
The paper that Mirth et al. published pointing to this is titled “Bad News: ‘Dickinsonia Found in Upper Vindhyan of India’ Isn’t Worth the Noise.”
A new article in the same journal showed that the statement was erroneous, which, in fact, the authors of the article admitted.
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