robert depalma obituary

Family and friends are welcome Thursday, February 18, 2021, from 6 to 8 p.m. at Slone & Co. Funeral Directors 13115 Lorain Ave, Cleveland, OH 44111, and for a Graveside Service on Friday, February 19, 2021, at 10:30 a.m. Ohio Western Reserve National Cemetery 10175 Rawiga Rd, Seville, OH 44273 (Please meet inside the gates at 10:15 a.m.), 13115 Lorain Ave, DePalma grew up in Boca Raton, Florida, and as a child he was fascinated by bones and the stories they contained. In an article in Science, published in 1980, they proposed that this impact was so large that it triggered the mass extinction, and that the KT layer was the debris from that event. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. The forests were charred stumps. Lower down, it graded into a more turbulent band of sand and gravel, which contained the heavier fish fossils, bones, and bigger tektites. August 24 . Expand the Memories and Condolences form. Robert DePalmashown here giving a talk at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Aprilpublished a paper in December 2021 showing the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs struck Earth in the spring. In the nineteenth century, OthnielC. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, the nations two leading paleontologists, engaged in a bitter competition to collect dinosaur fossils in the American West. Ways to honor Robert DePalma's life and legacy. Even a three-hundred-metre rock would end world agriculture.. Additional fossils, including this beautifully preserved fish tail, have been found at the Tanis site in North Dakota. He is survived by his brothers and sisters, Jayne Cleveland (Burt) of Troy, PA, Robin Ungaro of Clayton, Kenneth DePalma (Cindy) of Atco and Renee Hayes (Carlos) of Spain. Youre darn right it is, he said. In one fell swoop, DePalma may have solved the three-metre problem and filled in the gap in the fossil record. I thought that he was likely exaggerating, or that he might even be crazy. I have visited many paleontological sites, but I had never seen so many specimens found so quickly. Robert was born in Phila, PA and had been a lifetime resident of Atco, NJ. In that moment, the Cretaceous period ended and the Paleogene period began. The site is now under exclusive long-term lease.). Maybe well find the raptor that these feathers came from, but I doubt it. Obituaries. Robert A Depalma; This research examines a Konzentrat-Lagersttte, the Bone Butte site, in the Upper Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota. Robert was a member of the Raritan Road Runner M.C., the Blackhawks and a regular patron at the Cambridge Inn. Paddlefish still live today; they have a long bony snout, with which they probe murky water in search of food. If its what its said to be, Johnson said, its a fabulous discovery. But he declared himself uneasy until he could see DePalmas paper. Robert is predeceased by his father, Nicholas DePalma, Sr., his mother, Florence; step mother, Shirley and brother, Nicholas DePalma, Jr. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. 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. As DePalma carefully excavated the upper layers, he began uncovering an extraordinary array of fossils, exceedingly delicate but marvellously well preserved. One paleontologist estimated that in the Cretaceous period Hell Creek was so thick with T.rexes that they were like hyenas on the Serengeti. Click or call (800) 729-8809. This is called the KT boundary, because it marks the dividing line between the Cretaceous period and the Tertiary period. Results 1-20 of 34 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. Devoted father of Kerry Leigh Portilla and her husband Fabian, Joshua Robert DePalma and Jaime Lynn DePalma. He was predeceased by his loving wives, Rose Marie Amidon of 43 years and Barbara Sherlock of 13 years, and his brother, Gerald. The two men gathered their tools, got down on the floor of the hole, and began probing the three-foot-high walls of the deposit. In 2010, forty-one researchers in many scientific disciplines announced, in a landmark Science article, that the issue should be considered settled: a huge asteroid impact caused the extinction. All rights reserved. (Much of the Hell Creek land is privately owned, and ranchers will sell digging rights to whoever will pay decent money, paleontologists and commercial fossil collectors alike.) Robert A. (Paleontology has more than its share of unusual people.) The dig was a three-foot-deep rectangular hole, sixty feet long by forty feet wide. 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. Back in the lab, he would go through this surface to access the fossil, with the plaster jacket acting as a cradle below. The microtektites he had found earlier might have been carried there by water, but these had been trapped where they fellon what, DePalma believed, must have been the very day of the disaster. I was never into sports, he said. A bad day for dinosaurs was the subject of an engaging hour-and-a-half for both paleontologists and NASA researchers. Robert A. dePalma, vice chairman of the board of the Rockwell International Corporation died yesterday in Pittsburgh. DePalma says that hes discovered more than a dozen new species of animals and plants, and identified the broken teeth and bones, including hatchling remains, of almost every dinosaur group known from Hell Creek. Smit was a sedimentologist, and another researcher whom DePalma shared his data with, Mark Richards, now of the University of Washington, was a geophysicist. There are logjams of wood, fish pressed against cypress-tree root bundles, tree trunks smeared with amber. Most fossils end up being squashed flat by the pressure of the overlying stone, but here everything was three-dimensional, including the fish, having been encased in sediment all at once, which acted as a support. If its a tossup between getting more PaleoBondan expensive liquid glue used to hold fossils togetheror changing the air-conditioning filter, Im getting the PaleoBond. He is single, and shares a three-bedroom apartment with casts of various dinosaurs, including one of a Nanotyrannus. The rainfall of glass blobs, however, would have hit the area and stopped within about an hour after the impact. We could see when there were buds on the trees, he told me. ), Between the ages of three and four, I made a visual connection with the gracefulness of individual bones and how they fit together as a system, DePalma told me. Using that gauge, he calculated that potent seismic waves would have arrived at Tanis six minutes, ten minutes, and thirteen minutes after the impact. It solves the question of whether dinosaurs went extinct at exactly that level or whether they declined before, the paleontologist Jan Smit said. He had been the company's treasurer, vice president of financial analysis and from 1976 to 1991 its chief financial officer. Photograph courtesy of Robert DePalma. He exposed the feather with precise movements. When the mosquitoes got bad, DePalma took out a briar pipe and packed it with Royal Cherry Cavendish tobacco. The collector felt that the site, a three-foot-deep layer exposed at the surface, was a bust: it was packed with fish fossils, but they were so delicate that they crumbled into tiny flakes as soon as they met the air. . Many scientists view this trade as a threat to paleontology and argue that important fossils belong in museums. It may have been born in the Cretaceous and died in the Paleocene, he said. M David Demarco Funeral Home Inc. 205 Rhode Hall Rd. Robert DePalma. His face was tanned from long days in the sun and he had a five-day-old beard. If the site was what he hoped, he had made the most important paleontological discovery of the new century. He turned back to the block on his table and held a magnifying lens up to the tektite. Robert was a member of the Raritan Road Runner M.C., the Read More, DEPALMA Robert Michael DePalma Jr. of Columbus, Ohio passed away unexpectedly February 15, 2010 at the age of 26 years. 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). In lieu of flowers memorial donations can be made in Robert's name to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, visit www.lls.org for more information. To plant trees in memory, please visit the, I can't believe it has been a year. Robert L. DePalma, 69, died on September 4, 2013 at the Jersey Shore Medical Center. Crystal's heart was in helping others. To plant trees in memory, please visit the, Deepest Condolences to the Family. I cant wait to get this back to the lab.. At the time of the impact, the Hell Creek landscape consisted of steamy, subtropical lowlands and floodplains along the shores of an inland sea. Family and friends are welcome Thursday, February 18, 2021, from 6 to 8 p.m. at Slone & Co. Funeral Directors 13115 Lorain Ave, Cleveland, OH 44111, and for a Graveside Service on Friday, February 19, 2021, at 10:30 a.m. Ohio Western Reserve National Cemetery . He was predeceased by his parents, James and Anne DePalma and a sister, Delores . Robert was a loving Great Grandfather. He was hoping for a site like the one hed excavated earlier: an ancient pond with fine-grained, fossil-bearing layers that spanned many seasons and years. David Kessler's top 4 tips for dealing with holiday grief. And now look at this., From the lab table, he grabbed a fossil forearm belonging to Dakotaraptor, the dinosaur species hed discovered in Hell Creek. If, on a certain evening about sixty-six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. Similar formations, caused by hailstones hitting a muddy surface, had been found before in the fossil record. But opposition to the idea remains passionate. Funeral services will begin at 11:15am on Monday September 9, 2013 from the M. David DeMarco Funeral Home, Inc. 205 Rhode Hall Rd. Food has always been a go-to for people in mourning. Robert was born in Phila, PA and had been a . But DePalma insists on contractual clauses that give him oversight of the management of his specimens. I am thinking of you and praying for you both. Ways to honor Robert DePalma's life and legacy. He showed me a photo of the amber seen through a microscope. In the 21st century, it's not just urns and gravestones anymore. I was so skeptical after the talk I was convinced it was a fabrication. Johnson, who had been mapping the KT layer in Hell Creek, said that his research indicated that Tanis was at least forty-five feet below the KT boundary and perhaps a hundred thousand years older. When DePalmas find was picked up by the national media, Horner dismissed it as speculation and merely one data point. He suggested an alternative scenario: the T.rex might have accidentally bitten the tail of a sleeping hadrosaur, thinking that it was dead, and then backed away when it realized its mistake. We'll help you find the right words to comfort your family member or loved one during this difficult time. 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. The KT tsunami, even moving at more than a hundred miles an hour, would have taken many hours to travel the two thousand miles to the site. This is a digitized version of an article from The Timess print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. Funeral services will begin at 11:15 a.m. on Monday, Sept. 9, 2013, from the M. David DeMarco Funeral Home, Inc., 205 Rhode Hall Rd., Monroe Township., N.J. 08831 Read More, Robert L. DePalma Monroe Township, NJ Robert L. DePalma, 69, died on September 4, 2013 at the Jersey Shore Medical Center. 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. They tried to get me to do that so I would get along with the other kids. He later found a suitcase-size piece of fossilized skin from a ceratopsian attached to the hip bone. Beloved son of the Late Angelo & Mary DePalma. Utah. DePalmas control of his research collection is controversial. Other scientists have countered that the three-metre problem merely reflects how hard it is to find fossils. An aspiring novelist, he attended The Ohio State University studying English and Drama. Paleontology is maddening work, its progress typically measured in millimetres. Leave your condolences to the family on this memorial page or send flowers to show you care. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling. It was a very bad day, DePalma said. He was a member of the GAC and Amici D'Oro. 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. Robert James DePalma, 71, a longtime Florida resident passed away Tuesday, May 12, 2020 at his residence in Fort Myers, FL. He had served on its board since 1979. But eventually life emerged and blossomed again, in new forms. Every day is Christmas out here, he said. DePalma found five sets of these patterns. I got in, and we drove for an hour or so, turning through a ranch gate and following a maze of bone-rattling roads that eventually petered out in a grassy basin. 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. Ad Choices. This was not a paleontological question; it was a problem of geophysics and sedimentology. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. If one looks at the Earth as a kind of living organism, as many biologists do, you could say that it was shot by a bullet and almost died. Robert L. DePalma. Robert L. DePalma . A core sample from DePalmas site. Family. Although rebuilding a skeleton from thousands of bone fragments that have commingled with those of other species is not easy, DePalma was mortified by the attacks. He noted that every fish hed found in the site had died with its mouth open, which may indicate that the fish had been gasping as they suffocated in the sediment-laden water. He had already experienced harsh judgment when, in 2015, he published a paper on a new species of dinosaur called a Dakotaraptor, and mistakenly inserted a fossil turtle bone in the reconstruction. 2C8F>6?E H9:=6 D9@G6=:?8 D? Giving to charity is a meaningful way to honor someone who has died. Virginia. He found three more small craters with tektites in them, which he sectioned and photographed. I had never met DePalma, but we had corresponded on paleontological matters for years, ever since he had read a novel Id written that centered on the discovery of a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex killed by the KT impact. He believes that the jaw belonged to a marsupial that looked like a weasel. View Obituary & Service Information At the time, he told the Los Angeles Times, A scavenger doesnt come across a food source and realize all of a sudden that its alive. Horner eventually conceded that T.rex may have hunted live prey. The site may hold a precise geological transcript of the asteroid strike that almost wiped out life on the planet. Any Cretaceous mammal burrow is incredibly rare, he said. Obituaries can vary in the amount of information they contain, but many of them are genealogical goldmines, including information such as: names, dates, place of birth and death, marriage information, and family relationships. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. The tech company Wirecard was embraced by the German lite. One day sixty-six million years ago, life on Earth almost came to a shattering end. 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 June 2021, paleontologist Melanie During submitted a . It's surprising how much a musical selection can affect mourning. DePalma agreed. DePalma said, Its like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the bony fingers of Jimmy Hoffa, sitting on top of the Lost Ark. If Tanis had been closer to or farther from the impact point, this beautiful coincidence of timing could not have happened. It is truly a magnificent site, he wrote to me, adding that its surely one of the best sites ever found for telling just what happened on the day of the impact.. Horner argued that T.rex was too slow and lumbering, its arms too puny and its eyesight too poor, to prey on other creatures. 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. Grief researchers say holding that missing funeral service, even a year or more later, can still help us heal. Shore Medical Center DePalma insists on contractual clauses that give him oversight of the new.., Delores on contractual clauses that give him oversight of the amber seen through a microscope he attended the State! A threat robert depalma obituary paleontology and argue that important fossils belong in museums vice president financial! 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