The Decibel - Fossil feud: Paleontologists have a bone to pick with new find

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

In 2021, mine workers in Morocco made a huge discovery. They found a fossil that scientists believed to be a new species of mosasaur – a large swimming reptile that lived in the same era as the Tyrannosaurus Rex. However, many scientists, including a group in Alberta, are now questioning whether or not the fossil is real or fake.Ivan Semeniuk is The Globe’s science reporter. He’s on the show today to explain what we know about this fossil, the feud that it’s provoked between paleontologists, and when we might uncover the truth.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

This is a part of Morocco, south of Casablanca, where a lot of phosphate mining goes on. And of course, Morocco is one of the main sources of phosphate for the world. That's Ivan Semenik, The Globe's science reporter. You know, that phosphate was formed in a marine environment. We're really talking about, you know, millions of years ago, this was the ocean, or sort of a coastal environment. The chemistry that allows the phosphate to precipitate out of seawater, that also creates an environment that's very rich for marine life. And not surprisingly, there are amazing marine fossils that also are in these phosphate beds. A few years ago, mine workers in this region

said they found what looked to be a fossil belonging to a mosasaur, a large swimming reptile that lived in the same era as the Tyrannosaurus rex. There are a number of different kinds of mosasaurs, but you can imagine almost like a fish or a dolphin-like reptile, kind of with lots of sharp teeth, different sizes. And so these were fully marine creatures.

Of course, they're air breathing, they're reptiles, but they are hunting prey in the ocean. This particular mosasaur fossil looked different from the others. So different that a team of scientists said it represents a new type of mosasaur. That would be a huge discovery. But other scientists, including a group from Alberta, are skeptical of that. And now, there is a plan to test whether the fossil is real or if it's a fake. Ivan looked into this, along with former Globe intern Sheyma Shuiha.

Ivan joins us today to tell us about this fossil, the feud that it's provoked between paleontologists, and when we might uncover the truth. I'm Maynika Ramen-Wilms and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Ivan thanks so much for being here. Thank you very much. So Ivan, how common is it to discover the fossils of an extinct species these days? That's actually sort of a tricky question. I mean in one sense it is something that happens all of the time because, you know,

you have to think about how many species there are on the planet at any given moment and the fact that those species are changing and evolving and replacing each other at all times. So every time you're kind of looking into the past, you're getting a slice of time and you might find a specimen or sample of a species that's never been seen before, and so that species has to be catalogued and named or described. But of course, the tricky part is, is it really a brand new species, or is it just a variation within a species that's already known? These are questions that kind of tend to get hammered out later.

You know, and this is all across paleontology and biology where people debate about, you know, to what extent something is the same species or different species. But the short answer is that it's not uncommon when you're finding something that, oh, this is the first example of this specific species that we found. Usually it's in a family or group of species that are recognized, but then, you know, there might be a particular feature that distinguishes it as its own species. Okay. Well, let's talk then about this particular fossil that was found in

Morocco. It represents a previously undocumented species of Mosasaur. There was a paper that talked about this. So can you tell us about this, Ivan? What did the paper say about why these paleontologists thought this was a new species? Right. So this fossil turned up a few years ago in Morocco, and it was published in the journal Cretaceous Research. At the time, the paleontologists who documented this find, led by Nicholas Longertsch, who's a paleontologist at the University of Bath in the UK, decided that this was a new species and, you know, they proposed the name for the species. They called it Xenodens calminicari. And so the way they put that name together, Xeno means

strange, dens means tooth, and calminicari means like a saw because there's something unusual about the teeth of this fossil compared to other mosasaurs and they were proposing that maybe it was more like a scavenger that used its jaws almost like a saw to get bits of flesh perhaps out of larger prey or carcasses. Oh interesting so it was the teeth of this specimen that really kind of set it apart it seemed like from other ones then. Absolutely and I when we say specimen I also just want to make sure people have So it was the teeth of this specimen that really kind of set it apart, it seemed like, from other ones then. Absolutely. And when we say specimen, I also just want to make sure people have the right idea. We're not talking about a giant fossil with all of the bones and teeth and skull. We're talking about one partial bone from just one part of an upper jaw with two teeth

in it. So really something you could kind of hold in your hand and that one fragment of bone then represents the entire species but the rest of it is unseen. A small fraction of something that would probably be about the size of a full grown adult swimming in the water. So on the small side for Amosasaur, clearly Amosasaur, that part isn't disputed. The question is what is it exactly? Okay so is it yeah is it something that we're seeing for the first time or is it just kind of a regular specimen that we would expect to

see from a mosasaur? Or is it something entirely different so that's where it gets interesting, yes. Okay so this paper comes out kind of proposing that this this could be something new that we're seeing. What was the response to this paper in the paleontology world? That's a good question. I'm not sure if I can speak to the response that everyone had, but you know, it was there. I mean, people took it on board. You know, these kinds of papers are published all the time and Cretaceous Research is certainly a well-known journal, but it's in the process of taking it on board that the fossil raised a few red flags, and in

particular there was a group in Alberta that felt quite skeptical about what was being claimed about this fossil. But I have to say this is something that took time to settle in. The paper was published in 2021. It really wasn't until, you know, sort of 2024 that, you know, you've got this group in Alberta looking at the paper much more critically. Well, let's talk about this group of paleontologists then in Alberta. What did they have to say about this? So I'll start with Henry Sharp, who's a graduate student at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. And he was actually out in, you know, doing field work in Alberta. Of course, there are lots of dinosaurs in Alberta, so lots of things to be digging up. And there was a rainy day where he was stuck inside his

trailer during this field season, so he thought he'd catch up on his reading big stack of research papers. This is what scientists do in their spare time. And as he was going through this paper, he found himself skeptical about a number of reasons. Now there were images of the partial jawbone in the paper, and he could see the teeth that were in the jawbone, and some things to his eyes didn't quite seem to make sense. To the point where he was thinking, either this fossil can't be real, or it's really strange in a way that the authors should have made an even bigger deal of it. Because it just seemed to be like something no one had ever seen before.

So what was so strange about the teeth then, Ivan? Well, it has to do with the teeth. And I have to say, I'm not an expert on reptile teeth. And that's what it takes to really see how the differences jump out here. I think the simple way to boil it down is one thing that stands out is, you know, if you sort of look at the typical jaw of a vertebrate, you've got these sockets in which the teeth sit. It's like a little pocket, every tooth, you know,

sits in its own little pocket in the skull, and you can sort of see along the side of the jaw where those pockets are. And it seemed as though what was happening here was that there would be two teeth per socket rather than one, which, you know, and again I'm oversimplifying perhaps the difference here, but that was sort of one of the first clues, and then looking at it more closely it seemed to be less and less plausible.

So to have that two teeth per socket then, that actually stood out, to this paleontologist at least, as quite strange. Right. Okay, so he's reading this paper, seems maybe not quite right to Mr. Sharp. Where does he go from there? So when he's back in Edmonton, he's speaking with Michael Caldwell, who's a well-established professor of paleontology at the University of Alberta. And they discovered they'd both been reading the same paper

and both come to the same conclusion. There was something wrong with this fossil. And in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, Michael Caldwell was certain that it was a fake, that there was something unreal about the fossil. And so the two of them together, as well as a third author, a PhD student, Mark Powers, did a deep dive on this Xenodens fossil looking only at the images that were available in the Longreach paper and

presented their case for why this can't be real and suggested that it's probably a forgery of some kind, perhaps something that escaped the notice of the Xenodens authors and that it should be x-rayed and scanned for signs of forgery. And they published this in another journal, making the case that this species, so-called species should sort of be removed from the record. Wow. Okay.

So they take the opposite side of this then. You said they were basing this on images that they'd seen from the original paper. Had the team from Alberta actually gone out to see the fossil? They have not seen the fossil in person. At first it wasn't actually clear where the fossil was. Now we know that Dr. Longrich has the fossil, although it's kind of officially the property of the Museum of Natural History in Marrakesh and Morocco. So it belongs to Morocco.

So they did not see the fossil. So when Dr. Longrich and his co-authors prepared a written statement in rebuttal, the first thing they said was, how can you make this allegation based only on photographs? But of course, the fossil wasn't immediately available. And I have to say, I've been in contact with Caldwell and Sharp and the Alberta group. They have since then formally asked to see the fossil, which, you know, common practices, the fossil should be available because it's known as a type specimen. It's the specimen that defines the species.

They are still awaiting some word on whether they can examine the fossil or whether a time can be made when they can look at it. So that's still an open question. So far no one else has seen it. Okay. So apart from the two teeth per socket issue that we talked about earlier, is there anything else that I guess made them think that this fossil wasn't genuine? There were a bunch of things. In addition to where the teeth were placed, they pointed

to something that looked like a discoloration in the photographs. They were wondering if the teeth had been glued there. Basically, what they're imagining is maybe someone took a piece of bone without teeth and then glued some teeth in in a way that would make it look somewhat convincing as a fossil. Because if it's just a partial jawbone without teeth, it's not an especially interesting find. It's the teeth and the bone together that kind of make it an interesting fossil. And that's what, you know, allowed Longrich and his co-authors

to claim it as a new species. Now, the other important point here, and the Alberta group made this point, if you read Dr. Longrich's original paper, this specimen was not found by paleontologists. It was found by miners working in the phosphate mines. And this is not uncommon. People are in these mines. They're working working away and fossils are turning up all the time

and of course there's a bit of a cottage industry in finding and selling fossils in Morocco. So then you can't actually say what the providence is of this fossil. We don't know exactly where it came from other than it came from a particular mine but where in the mind nobody knows. And also, what happened to it in between the time it was found and by the time it was acquired by Dr. Longrich, that's also not known. So these are things that kind of raised the red flags as well. Yeah, this seems like a really important point then, if it's found by miners and not paleontologists,

it sounds like this was kind of another issue that could be raised here as to its genuineness. Right. And I should say this is not uncommon because a lot of fossils that are found in the world are not looked at by scientists at all. They're being found and sold to private collectors. And if fossils are forged or faked. And you know, a fake could be something like pieces of different fossils or different species are kind of assembled to make it look like it's the same single thing, you know, that sort of thing. If that can be done expertly enough, even experts can be fooled by this sometimes. And there are some famous cases of this, you know, I'll just mention one. Back in 1999, National Geographic magazine

had a big press conference announcing a missing link between dinosaurs and birds. This was a fossil that came from China called Archaeoraptor. Only later did it emerge that this fossil was actually made up of separate bones from separate species that were put together to make it look like it was a single species. and all of that had to be Retracted and experts were fooled by this so it's not unheard of that this could happen and of course collectors who are not necessarily

Trained scientists can be fooled all the time. So there's some incentive to to make fossils appear more interesting than they really are We'll be back after this message than they really are. We'll be back after this message. So Ivan, we've looked at the situation surrounding this particular Mosasaur fossil, but I understand that this isn't the first time that these two paleontologists have actually clashed over a fossil. What do we know about their history? That's right. I think it's fair to say there's tension here and the tension goes back. In

a way, it's a kind of made in Alberta argument. I mean, it sort of seems like it's spread around the world. You know, you've got a fossil from Morocco, you've got researchers in England and Paris, and then you've got this Alberta group complaining. But Nicholas Longrich himself did his PhD at the University of Calgary. He's the one who wrote the original paper on this fossil. The original paper. And you know, so there's an Alberta story in the middle of Calgary. He's the one who wrote the original paper on this fossil. The original paper. And, you know, so there's an Alberta story in the middle of all of this. And the researchers on both sides have known each other for quite some time and have also

debated and disagreed over other fossils. Years ago, Nicholas Longrich published a paper about a fossil that he described as a fossil snake, a four-legged snake, kind of a precursor to modern snakes. Later, Dr. Caldwell went to have a look at the fossil, wrote a counter paper that basically outlines his objections why it's not a snake. And you know, there's a little bit of snarkiness there about, you know, not only who's right, but whether there's professional jealousy or whether, you know, not only who's right, but whether there's professional

jealousy or whether, you know, people are being fair in their criticism. So various statements have been made online and we know that there's tension between these two. Okay, so kind of a similar situation where, you know, Dr. Longrich has published a paper and Dr. Caldwell is kind of calling him out on it and saying, I don't agree with it. It happened before and it's happening, something similar is happening again. Right. And so, you know, I'll do my best to be fair and paraphrase both. I think Nicholas

Longrich would say, look, we're constantly being shown how nature is more creative than we think. Lots of interesting species are turning up all the time. And these are no exceptions. Michael Caldwell would say there's an epidemic of false fossils out there and perhaps species that shouldn't be a species. And there should be some clamping down and a little bit more rigor with practices around this. Wow.

OK, so if we come back to the fossil at hand in this situation, what can they do now? Like is there anything to prove if this is a genuine fossil or not? Well there certainly are things that can be done and I should say about the glue and the teeth, I mean Nicholas Longrich responded to all of those things and said you know this idea of a discoloration or glue, this is something that was done by a hardening agent. He'll say that he prepared the fossil himself, you know, one of the teeth fell out when he was doing that, so he could look right into the socket and it, you know, if it was a forgery, he basically said in his statement that he would have seen that.

And in fact, he told us that he is 100% sure that this fossil is genuine and in addition to that he has other specimens of Xenodens that he is also looking at. These are still unpublished and Michael Caldwell is very skeptical about all of this. In fact there was a conference in Alberta where there was a poster with some other Xenodens, alleged other Xenodens fossils, and the critics on Alberta said these are not the same species. So, you know, it's just kind of escalated. So what can be done? Well, the original fossil, the type specimen, could go through a CT scan, a kind of X-ray that would probably reveal if the parts of it were not part of the same animal.

And that has been done in the past. In fact, something like that was done with the Archaeoraptor example years ago, you know, this famous missing link between the birds and the dinosaurs that turned out not to be a real fossil. So CT scans that can penetrate the bone and look at their internal structure, you know, can be very revealing. So the call is for this to happen. And in fact, Caldwell and Sharp and the Alberta team would say this should be standard practice for any fossil that a paleontologist did not directly lift out of the ground. And do we know when that's going to happen then if it does indeed go for a CT scan? So Dr. Longridge said that again, they stand by the fact that the fossil is genuine.

They don't think there's any forgery going on here, but they allow that there could be additional information to be gained from such a scan. And so they are say that they are preparing to do this. And the last we've heard sometime in June this will take place although it's not entirely clear when that will happen. It will take place we've been told at the Museum of Natural History in Paris but it remains to be seen how much information will gain from that. I should say that we also spoke to the editor of Cretaceous Research this is

the journal that published the original paper, you know, and from her point of view, everything was done correctly in terms of the peer review of the paper. And her point of view is that it will take a third team to look independently and come to some judgment. So it may take a while to sort it all out. Okay. I wonder as we go through all of this process, are there standard practices in the paleontology world for cases of potential fossil forgery? Is there kind of a set things that you go through in order to prove or disprove something? I think it's fair to say there are norms in the field and among those norms are a type specimen should be available to others to study.

There's sort of a general idea about what you do when you're introducing a new species, for example. But different groups interpret those norms differently. And we see this, by the way, in other areas of science. Part of the reason this interests me is not just because of the fossils, not just because of mosasaurs, but what it says about the practice of science, where, you know, we think of science as delivering kind of truth and reality, or our sense of what's real out there in the material world. And that is, I mean, science is a powerful tool for telling us what's really going on. But to get there, there's an awful lot of debate and uncertainty in the analysis of

the evidence. So it's at that leading edge of, you know, you've got some evidence, you've got some fossils, you've got some various different data, people may interpret it differently. And in any field of research, you always find some researchers who maybe are more bold or more exuberant in their interpretation, others who are more conservative. And you know, sometimes the truth is somewhere in the middle, sometimes one side is right, sometimes the other side is right.

It's fascinating to see what will the final answer be, or maybe there is no final answer, but what starts to emerge as people take a closer look. Yeah, well, just before I let you go then, Ivan, on that note, it sounds like both sides in this dispute are, in a way, putting their reputation on the line with this situation. Both seem very certain that they're correct. Are there any consequences professionally for the team that ends up being wrong here?

That's an interesting question. And I think that's part of the reason why this story is particularly interesting, because when there are scientific disputes in other areas, most of the time, both sides will allow for some uncertainty. And you might hear something like, well, they may be right, but my gut is telling me that's not the story, and kind of vice versa. But they might allow that there's enough uncertainty to kind of cover each other as a possible explanation,

but then they might debate about whether that's the likely explanation. Here you really have two researchers saying, I'm 100% sure this is not a real fossil, and another saying, I'm 100% sure this is genuine. That doesn't happen so often, and perhaps it has something to do with this particular field of research where people do make their reputations on what is found and kind of the discoveries that they become attached to. And of course, naming a fossil means that you become attached to that find for the duration of your career.

And if it's a famous fossil or if it becomes kind of important in the larger picture of evolutionary biology, that's kind of a feather in your cap. So that's something that people are reluctant to give up. Ivan, this is a fascinating story. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here. My pleasure.

Thanks for letting me talk about it. That was Ivan Semenik, The Globe's science reporter. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramin-Wilms. This episode was produced by Aja Souter. Our intern is Kelsey Howlett. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham.

David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.