Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
You have correctly inferred that there is a vertebrate at the end of this
structure. But it's not a [ancient] crocodile. It's a dinosaur, a hypsilopho-
dont.
Never had I been so happy to be mistaken. It was a dinosaur in a burrow. Sure,
lots more scientific questions had to be asked before jumping to any more conclu-
sions, but this revelation warranted a happy dance (as demonstrated by Snoopy in
A Charlie Brown Christmas
), followed by popping the cork on a champagne bottle,
and concluded by a happy dance while swigging vigorously from that champagne
bottle. Lacking champagne, though, I merely pried off the caps of whatever beers
were in my fridge at the time and toasted this discovery with my wife Ruth, who
was promptly sworn to secrecy about Dave's discovery.
Just to give you an idea of the depth of my wrongness in not thinking about a
dinosaur as a possible burrowmaker, as well as the consequences of Dave and his
field crew finding a dinosaur in a burrow, the following is a definitive statement I
hadmadeinthesecondeditionofmythen-newlyreviseddinosaurtextbook.Asyou
readthisstatement,keepinmindthatIhadjustextensively rewritten the topic,after
blistering peer review and editing, and it was already on its way toward publication
a few months later:
Furthermore, no convincing evidence has revealed that dinosaurs lived
underground because no dinosaur has ever been found in a burrow
,
nor
have any burrows been attributed to them
.
By the way, did I mention I was wrong? Of course I did not think “dinosaur”
when looking at the photograph earlier in the day, as all of my ideological blinders
had been switched on. Was I studying modern alligator dens at the time, biasing
me to think “crocodile” instead of “dinosaur”? Check. Had I previously thought
aboutburrowingdinosaursbutrejectedtheirexistenceonthebasisofwhatwasthen
known? Check. Had I let these biases overrule the fact that Dave studies dinosaurs
