Dinosaurs Without Bones (22 page)

In the initial submission of the report, authors are welcome to suggest potential reviewers who they think would give fair, thorough, and relatively impartial assessments of your work. Authors can also state who should
not
review it. This is normally because of a conflict of interest, such as a potential reviewer being a cantankerous pedant who has never agreed with a single word written in any of the authors’ previous reports, including “and,” “the,” and especially “but.” If you’re really unlucky, though, the editor will pick just that person, either out of a sense of being “fair and balanced” (in a cable-news sort of way) or because the editor enjoys watching intellectual fireworks. The editor may even pick the much-dreaded third reviewer, who always seems to have an opinion that diverges wildly from those of the other two reviewers, presenting editors and authors alike with head-scratching dilemmas.

Once the reviews are in to the editor, she or he makes a decision about the paper. Choices are: accept it into the journal with minor revisions; accept it but with major revisions; or outright rejection. Most journals also have an “anonymous reviewer” policy in which they keep the reviewers’ identities secret, unless they make themselves known to authors after the review, which allows for some dialogue. To make matters even more challenging, editors and reviewers are volunteers, performing these duties for free on top of their other professional obligations. This means that reviewing a scientific paper can easily become a low priority, perhaps eking out a spot ahead of, say, taking out the garbage or cleaning the kitty litter at home. Then, if the article is accepted, authors must revise it, which includes formatting each and every cited reference to the exasperatingly exact and idiosyncratic standards of that specific journal. Sometimes authors get so discouraged that they give up during this part of the process, and the article never gets revised and resubmitted. All of this means that science is not just about making discoveries and announcing them to the world, but also is about jumping through hoops and hopefully being rewarded with publication, or slinking away in abject failure.

With all of this in mind, Dave, Yoshi, and I wrote our report about this new species of burrowing dinosaur, its young, and its burrow, and we gave it a simple title:
A Burrowing, Denning Dinosaur
. If you had asked us then, we would have told you that our paper was astonishing, a true masterpiece of paleontological literature that would surely earn the academic equivalent of an A++++++ (evoking Ralphie’s daydream from the movie
A Christmas Story
). With supreme confidence, in mid-2006 we submitted it to an elite scientific journal, one in which Dave had published papers before.

But then peer review struck. Remember in the preceding description where the editor can say “not worthy” and kick it back to you without further review? That happened to us not once but twice. An editor from the first journal sent a terse 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 following 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 submission.

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 paleontologist 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. We had to hurry, though, as our concept of burrowing dinosaurs was starting to take on form through other people. For example, in a
paper published in late 2006, its author (David Loope) proposed small dinosaurs as possible burrowmakers for large structures he found in Early Jurassic rocks of the western U.S. Although Loope did not have any bones in these burrows, his analysis of the burrows was very well done and perfectly credible. The secrecy we had kept around our discovery was 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 associated with Dave’s original Montana field crew. It was only a matter of time before 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.

For the proverbial “third time’s the charm” attempt, toward the end of 2006 we sent our report to a venerable British journal,
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London
. This time, the editor kindly gave us a chance and sent the article to two reviewers, both of whom signed their names to their honest and in-depth assessments of the research. One agreed with nearly everything we said, but the other thought we had placed too much emphasis on biologically based arguments and needed to include more geological evidence. Oddly, the editor then told us the paper was “rejected,” but encouraged us to resubmit a revised article. It was like being told by a date that he or she thinks you’re ugly, smelly, and stupid, but would like to go out with you again, just as long as you lose some weight, take a shower, and start playing Sudoku. Nonetheless, we did as told, revised and resubmitted, and the paper was finally accepted.

In February 2007, the online version of the paper was finally released, which coincided with our sending out press releases, and a good amount of media attention followed. Granted, this was not a feathered dinosaur from China, nor was it a close relative of
Tyrannosaurus rex
. Nevertheless, after 95 million years,
Oryctodromeus cubicularis
, a dinosaur buried in a burrow of its making and with its offspring, was now known to the rest of the world. The words “denning,” “burrowing,” and “dinosaur” could be used in the same
sentence, and thanks to a fortuitous combination of trace and body fossil evidence, dinosaurs had entered yet another dimension in our Mesozoic imaginations: underground.

Dinosaurs Down Under

We were lost. As a result, this otherwise fine fall day of May 10, 2006 had turned into an unexpectedly long one for our group of eight while we hiked atop the high cliffs of Cretaceous rocks along coastal Victoria, Australia. We were looking for an auspiciously named locality—Knowledge Creek—that continued to elude us despite our maps, GPS units, and field-savvy participants, including a few Australians who knew the surrounding area. Having already taken two wrong turns down toward the shore, only to double back and climb up, we were all becoming a bit tired and frustrated. Below us, ocean waves burst onto the rocks, a dull, rhythmic booming carried to us by a strong, cool sea breeze, imploring us to try again.

In the early afternoon, we finally found the proper route, a grassy path that cut through the scrubby coastal forest parallel to a ravine cut by Knowledge Creek. Two of our group went back to fetch our vehicles, a sacrifice that would shorten the travel time for the rest of us at the end of the day and supply our field lunches, which we had dumbly left behind. The steep incline down to the coastal outcrops promised a long, slow fight against gravity that would coincide with diminishing light, as the sun began arcing toward the horizon. Underestimating the length and difficulty of the hike in, some of our group had not brought enough water, and those of us who did shared what little we had left. On the off chance that any dinosaur bones would be found at the site, one of our party was hauling a portable rock saw on his back, and another was carrying fuel for it. I did not envy their journey back up the slope we were now descending for a third time. None of us had ever been to Knowledge Creek, and two paleontologists who had visited before us had only gone once, firmly vowing to never come back. We were starting to understand why.

Australians have a long tradition of ill-fated expeditions, and I felt like I had unwittingly instigated one of these. Yet our motivations were paleontological, and with good reason. First of all, I was in Victoria on a semester-long sabbatical from my university to work on a science-education project with Patricia (Pat) Vickers-Rich. In 1980, she and her husband Tom Rich trekked to Knowledge Creek; yes, they were the two aforementioned paleontologists who had been there before us. They were prospecting for dinosaur bones in the Early Cretaceous (~105
mya
) rocks there, which had been found at other coastal outcrops just east of Knowledge Creek. While there, they failed to find any bones, but they did manage to discover what was then the only clear example of a dinosaur track in all of southern Australia. Only about 10 cm (4 in) wide and long, with three stout and well-defined toes, the track was attributed to a small ornithopod dinosaur, probably a hypsilophodont.

By the time I arrived in Australia—more than 25 years later—it was still the only undisputed dinosaur track in all of southern Australia. I had found some not-so-clear dinosaur tracks only a few months before at another spot, but it was time to find more. Thus, the purpose of our troublesome foray that day was to revisit the source of that track and look for more dinosaur tracks. Pat and Tom, still filled with the wisdom imparted by Knowledge Creek the day they went there in 1980, had declined our invitation to come along.

Dinosaur bones were relatively rare in this part of the world and, most interesting, represented a polar dinosaur assemblage. Based on plate-tectonic reconstructions, the rocks in this part of Australia were originally formed near the South Pole, when southern Australia was connected to Antarctica during the Early Cretaceous (130–100
mya
) before drifting north to its present location. Nearly all of the dinosaur bones and teeth in strata there were from small dinosaurs, and most of these were hypsilophodonts. Only a few pieces were from theropods, such as one bone that came from a dinosaur similar to the Late Jurassic
Allosaurus
of North America.

Hence, Pat and Tom often asked themselves, “Why hypsilophodonts?” and wondered how these ornithopods, which were
probably too small to migrate, had adapted to long, cold, dark winters of polar environments during the Cretaceous. In a paper they and other co-authors published in the journal
Science
in 1988, they proposed that hypsilophodonts and other dinosaurs in the region were likely endothermic, or “warm-blooded,” generating their own body heat. At that time, warm-blooded dinosaurs were still being hotly debated (no pun intended), and recall that Robert Bakker’s
The Dinosaur Heresies
had only been published two years before then. Not all paleontologists were so accepting of the idea that dinosaurs were less like reptiles and more like birds, and others thought that maybe dinosaurs represented something entirely different from either group of modern animals.

Pat and Tom, along with many other contributors to their paper, fed this debate further by documenting the best-known polar dinosaur assemblage in the Southern Hemisphere. This added support to the then-remarkable idea that dinosaurs lived in frigid places, a hypothesis later backed up by discoveries of thousands of dinosaur bones and tracks in Cretaceous rocks of Alaska that were also in formerly polar environments.

However, a single sentence in this 1988 paper later shouted at me, showing some remarkable prescience by the authors. It was a simple sentence, and one that very easily could have been cut by the authors, peer reviewers, or editor for being too speculative. Here is what they said:

With the possible exception of the Allosaurus sp., all of the animals were small enough to have found shelter readily by burrowing.

That particular day, while winding down into the valley carved by Knowledge Creek, I was not aware of that sentence, nor would I have cared. We were doggedly trying to get to the shoreline to look at the exposed rocks along the marine platform to see whether any more dinosaur tracks were there. Once the path exited the forest, we crossed the trickle of fresh water that was Knowledge Creek, and
most of us successfully avoided the leeches there, wriggling excitedly at our warm-blooded presence. Our boots met Cretaceous rock surfaces, which extended out as a platform and met the sea. Successful in reaching our goal, we paused to catch our breath but also found ourselves gasping in another way at the spectacular cliffs of bedded sandstones and conglomerates looming above us. Because this part of the world was entering winter, the waves at the shore were noticeably higher and more vigorous than usual, encouraged by offshore winds that had just blown over and around Tasmania.

With little time left before we had to meet our two vehicle-driving companions, we started looking for dinosaur tracks, bones, or anything else paleontological that caught our attention. One of our party, Mike Cleeland, was a long-time volunteer with Pat and Tom in their Victoria-dinosaur endeavors, and despite his great height, he was legendary for his uncanny ability to spot tiny scraps of bone. Hence, he and most others there had their “osteo-eyes” switched on, looking for bones and teeth. Alternatively, my wife Ruth (who had enthusiastically persevered with us through the day) and I were using our “ichno-eyes” to search for trace fossils ranging from small invertebrate burrows to dinosaur tracks.

What I was not expecting to see there was a dinosaur burrow. Even less likely, it matched the form and dimensions of the fossil burrow that Dave Varricchio and I had unearthed in the Cretaceous rocks of Montana only eight months before. Yet there it was in the outcrop, a gently dipping structure with a sediment-filled tunnel that twisted right, then left, and connected with an expanded chamber. It was naturally cast with sandstone toward its top and conglomerate at its bottom, but clearly cut across the bedding surrounding it. I stood transfixed, barely breathing, and gaped at it long enough to prompt Ruth to come over to stare with me.