‘Dickinsonia fossil’ found in Bhimbetka turns out to be decayed beehive
The fossil believed to be of Dickinsonia, found at the Bhimbetka Rock Shelters near Bhopal in 2021. File
| Photo Credit: The Hindu
Fossils of an extinct species of animal that scientists reported in a sensational discovery from India’s Bhimbetka Rock Shelters in 2021 have been found to be a false alarm.
Gregory Retallack, the lead author of the February 2021 paper that reported the discovery, has acknowledged to The New York Times that they are planning to correct their paper after a closer look at the site revealed the apparent fossil to really be wax smeared on a rock by a bee hive.
In March 2020, Dr. Retallack, a professor of palaeontology at the University of Oregon, and some other researchers were given a tour of the Bhimbetka Rock Shelters, in Madhya Pradesh, by members of the Geological Survey of India when they had flown to India to attend a conference.
There, according to The New York Times, they spotted by chance what looked like a 44-cm-wide fossil of Dickinsonia, an animal that lived at least 538 million years ago, in a cave. Dickinsonia fossils in other parts of the world have indicated it was circular or oval in shape, somewhat flat, with rib-like structures radiating from a central column.
Dr. Retallack and his peers took photographs of the rock feature, since they weren’t carrying their tools, and determined them with further analysis to be Dickinsonia fossils. They published a paper describing their findings in February 2021.
But when Joseph Meert, a professor of geology at the University of Florida, visited the same Bhimbetka cave in December 2022, he found some discrepancies with the other fossil finds.
Eventually, he was able to conclude that “the impression resulted from decay of a modern beehive which was attached to a fractured rock surface”, as he wrote in his paper published in January 2023. When Dr. Retallack was notified of these findings, he decided to have his paper corrected.
While the fossils were believed to be legitimate, they suggested that the youngest Upper Vindhyan sediments were 540 million years old; the rock shelters are located in this area. But now that the finding has been overturned, Meert et al. wrote in their paper, “The age of the Upper Vindhyan … remains contested.”