Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
When the floods buried the eggs in their debris, it not only began the
fossilization that preserved the eggs but also either drowned or suf-
focated the helpless embryos inside under a massive sheet of water or
a sticky blanket of mud. Thus the floods not only killed the embryos,
but by burying the eggs in a layer of protective mud, prevented them
from being exposed to plunder by scavengers, which would have
greatly decreased their chances of being preserved as fossils. This
might sound pretty awful, but for us paleontologists living 80 million
years later, it was a stroke of good luck.
At last, the probable cause of death had been established, and we
were now ready to submit our scientific paper to a journal for publi-
cation. Because our discoveries represented so much new information
and so many firsts for paleontology, we decided to try to get our
paper published in one of the most prestigious scientific journals in
the world,
Nature.
We sent them our paper in the middle of 1998, but
it would be several more months before the paper was actually pub-
lished. Although we thought that the media might be interested in our
discoveries when the paper finally came out, we were not prepared for
the overwhelming reaction.
