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been re-studied, but this iteration put everything back to where we started, with the
original story of Lark Quarry mostly intact.
Oneproblem,though,wasthatThulborn'scritiquewasacerbicallywordedand
pointedly critical of the new results, including the inflammatory word “fabricated,”
implyingthatsomeofthedatamayhavebeeninvented.Consequently,Romilioand
Salisbury complained vehemently to the journal, and as a result an editor or em-
ployeeofthepublishingcompanythatownedthejournaldecidedthearticlewastoo
hot to keep in print. Hence, it did what very few academic journals do, which was
pull the article offline.
A few people (including me) were lucky enough to have downloaded it before
it vanished from the Web, which felt vaguely like owning a bootleg Bob Dylan al-
bum.(Although,basedonthetoneofthearticle,IronMaidenmightbeabetterana-
logy.) Suddenly, the former existence of the article or people possessing a copy of
it did not matter, as no one can cite it in their own research. Its abrupt absence from
the journal was thus the academic equivalent of “disappearing” Thulborn's work
and all it portended.
Nevertheless, this was not the end of this scientific squabble. Thulborn sub-
mitted a revised version of his article to the Australian paleontology journal
Al-
cheringa
. It went through peer review again and was published in early 2013. (Full
disclosure: I was one of the reviewers of this paper.) So once this critique was back
in the public realm and available for the paleontological community to assess, the
controversy over Lark Quarry and its mysterious dinosaur tracks resumed again,
and probably not for the last time.
Then,alsoearlyin2013,theaquamusicalversionwasunveiled.Inanotherart-
iclebyRomilioandSalisbury,joinedbypaleontologistRyanTucker,theyproposed
that the “dinosaur stampede” was actually made by small dinosaurs—either thero-
pods or ornithopods—swimming downcurrent in a river, not a lakeshore, and over
days, not in a moment of panic. In this paper, they explained that long shallow digit
impressions left by the feet and the long distances between each impression were a
