
From Fame To Falling: the paleos whos careers crashed and burned
The rise and fall of people's careers has always been a fascinating thing to talk about. Seeing someone go from so respected and admired to almost despised is something that at first can defy belief. When we usually think of that we usually think of an actor who committed some kind of scandal or a politician who made bad decisions. People rarely think of paleontology or the sciences as having that kind of stuff. It's almost like people think it's benign and free of much controversy.
But paleontology has had its own shares of rise and falls of its prominent operatives. And I'm going to be talking about four of them here.
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ROBERT DEPALMA
Robert DePalma was a young paleontologist that had risen to Fame in the 2010s. He had made some discoveries in the hell Creek formation. He had discovered the taniis site, which is possibly the only deposit in the world that directly formed on the day of impact of the dino killing asteroid. He also named Dakota raptor which briefly took the media by storm due to the notion that there was a giant dromaeosaur that lived long side T-Rex.
But as soon as he appeared to be gaining Fame and respect it all came crashing down. Depalma was more like an Indiana Jones kind of figure Fame and attention first science second.
He refused to allow anyone to access the Tanis site. It then turned out that Dakota raptor was a chimera of turtles and unrelated bones and very few material was actually assignable to a raptor. He then shipped it off to some private collectorship seemingly to avoid further scrutiny.
It then came out that he had stolen and misappropriated at the work of one of his colleagues and took credit for it.
These scandals appear to have done their dues. You hardly hear anything out of Robert depalma anymore and I'm not even sure he's still working in the field of paleontology.
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OCTAVIO MATEUS
Octavio was arguably one of the most important European paleontologists of the 21st century. When it came to late Jurassic dinosaurs the Morrison formation had a nearly uncontested Monopoly. The tendaguru of Tanzania seemed to be a rival but there hadn't been much prospecting since a German expedition (hum Rich African fossil deposits that were prospected by the Germans and then not prospected again for a long time, I wonder where I heard that before) and it's compounded by the fact that the fossil record of theropods there is so atrociously poor.
In the mid 20th century several fossils of dinosaurs had been found in Portugal in the coastal cliffs of the lourinha formation but not much ever came out of it. Octavia had been obsessed with dinosaurs ever since he was a young kid and he made it a personal mission to increase the scientific knowledge of Jurassic Portugal.
Beginning in the 1990s more and more fossils started to come out of the cliffs of Portugal and by the 2000s the lourinha formation of Portugal had rapidly come to rival the Morrison formation as a source of dinosaurs. This is largely thanks to Octavio and his work. So many of the dinosaurs that were named and dug out of the Portuguese rocks in the past 30 years were because of his prospecting and his descriptions. And he started doing all of this before he even reached his 20s.
But then the reason he's on this list reared its head. In 2023 numerous women came forward and accused him of sexual harassment, predatory behavior and fostering an abusive environment. The allegations dated back since 2010 but didn't come forward until 2023. He was then suspended by his university but then for some reason they gave him papal clemency.
The effect on his career has been noticeable. Ever since then he hasn't put out as many papers or named as many new taxa. He seems to have largely been superseded by malafaia and colleagues as the preeminent paleontologist of Portugal. It got to the point that in Walking with Dinosaurs 2025 they made it seem like torvosaurus gurneyi was described by Carla Tomas and simao mateus when it wasn't, it was off Octavio's description. Carla is more of a preparator lady and public face for the museum while simao is more of a reconstruction guy than describing animals. They just didn't include him for the aforementioned controversies.
He is truly divisive in my opinion. On the one hand he is an absolute POS for what he did to all those women. He was a predator and what he did was reprehensible. But arguably we would know practically nothing about Jurassic Portugal If it wasn't for his work. The lourinha formation and its depiction in dinosaur revolution were my whole childhood and even still to this day I prefer that formation over the Morrison any day of the week. It's kind of hard because this is a case where you have to separate the art from the artist. The art is great but the artist isn't.
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NICK LONGRICH
Nick Longrich is an American paleontologist. He started out his career by describing and talking about a lot of dinosaurs in Western North America before eventually coalescing a lot of his efforts around New Mexican, Mexican and Moroccan fossils.
At the start he started out as kind of an unremarkable paleontologist. He did a good amount of work but I wouldn't really say a lot of it was either influential or controversial.
But then it came out that he was an abusive bully. He verbally abused many of his students and it got to the point where he lost a 1 million pound Grant in 2018.
Paleontologists who I've emailed basically echo the same sentiment that he's very difficult to work with and pretty much a prick. They've also said a lot of his ideas, theories and methods aren't particularly great. For example 1 paleontologist I talked to literally said “titanoceratops is one of the few things he got right.” Like damn dude.
Despite his controversies he hasn't stopped posting a lot of papers and naming new animals but this is a case where he's all about quantity and not quality. He is infamous for naming animals based on too few remains. He named a troodont off a single badly weathered fragment of the top of a skull. Some of the animals he's named such as pluridens have been accused of being forgery fossils.
It's practically a meme that the newest Nick longrich taxa is basically going to be another slop-a-saurus.
He's also just been kind of weird at times like in one of his videos about the dinosaur killing asteroid he went on some weird tangent about spiritualism or something.
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EMILY WILLOUGHBY
Okay so technically she is not a paleontologist but she's a prominent paleo artist so I still think she counts.
When I was a kid her paleoart was so influential to me. Whenever I visualize my favorite raptors it was always her images that came up in my head. One of my favorite paleontology YouTubers trey the explainer also admired her artwork.
She really managed to bring feathered dinosaurs to life in such detail in splendor.
But then of course she had to be controversial.
It came out that she had been drawing how I should put this “naughty German deinonychus”.
She had been drawing these really weird effed up and downright esoteric imagery that was just, what?
And also turns out she became a very prominent proponent of eugenics and scientific racism. According to prehistorica cm she supports the idea that intelligence has a racial element to it.
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JACK HORNER
Jack Horner has been talked to death so I'll keep this as brief as can be.
Obviously he was an important paleontologist in his early career, finding evidence of dinosaurs being good parents, supporting the idea that they were more closely related to birds and were active dynamic creatures etc.
Then he became an outspoken supporter that T-Rex was just an obligate scavenger. Now some people have criticized him for this but others have said that this was just a public ploy to fuel more discussion and discovery about Tyrannosaurus.
Then he married one of his students when she was 18 and he was in his sixties and it didn't help that he had known her since she was a child.
And then he popped up in the Epstein files. Think you understand the gist of it.