Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
happened tousnotoncebuttwice. Aneditor fromthefirstjournal sentaterse reply
within just a few days of submission, informing us that it was “not appropriate for
the journal at this time,” a response that made us wonder if the previous or follow-
ing week would have been better. A little daunted and confused, we regrouped and
revised the article, then submitted it to another elite scientific journal. This met a
similar fate, with the rejection notice again coming only a couple of days after sub-
mission.
We were confounded. What had gone wrong? It was hard to say, considering
that neither journal editor addressed anything about the content of our manuscript.
Perhaps it was just a matter of bad timing, as both journals may have had too many
other dinosaur-discovery articles in review or being published then and those other
specimens were more attractive or from more exotic places. Or as one paleontolo-
gist acerbically commented to Dave afterwards, “Well, of course they didn't accept
it. It [the dinosaur] didn't have feathers and it wasn't from China.” Oh well. That's
the nature of science.
With egos properly deflated, we decided to try one more time, and with a
journal that would be more receptive to the notion of a burrowing dinosaur from
Montana.Wehadtohurry,though,asourconceptofburrowingdinosaurswasstart-
ing to take on form through other people. For example, in a paper published in late
2006,itsauthor(DavidLoope)proposedsmalldinosaursaspossibleburrowmakers
for large structures he found in Early Jurassic rocks of the western U.S. Although
Loopedidnothaveanybonesintheseburrows,hisanalysisoftheburrowswasvery
welldoneandperfectlycredible.Thesecrecywehadkeptaroundourdiscoverywas
also starting to unravel. In mid-2006, I stumbled onto an ostensibly innocent online
discussion about burrowing dinosaurs, but one that had been prompted by someone
associatedwithDave'soriginalMontanafieldcrew.Itwasonlyamatteroftimebe-
fore more information got out, and peer review might be compromised by any such
rumors (or facts). Editors and reviewers tend to frown on papers in which authors
seek pre-publication publicity, and we did not need to risk this study any further.
