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After the @NewYorker broke the 'dinosaur graveyard' story last week, the @PNASNews peer-reviewed research paper on the end-Cretaceous Tanis site is officially released today. These are my current thoughts:
The site is amazing. Potentially a discovery of enormous magnitude. The geology seems credible to me: it records a catastrophic event at or near the end-Cretaceous asteroid impact. The fish fossils are *astounding*. Congrats to the team!
But the research paper is not about dinosaurs. The @NewYorker article breathlessly describes a 'graveyard' with bones of all of the major Hell Creek dinosaurs, plus feathers, and eggs, and even embryos. None of this is in the research paper: just one mention of one dinosaur bone.
I've had about 20 journalists ask me about the 'dinosaur graveyard.' I've done my best (in my free time and transit time on a research trip) to read the research paper and give my honest opinion on what is the biggest dinosaur story in quite some time.
The way the embargo was broken, and the way the dinosaur side of the story was sensationalized in the @NewYorker, were hugely frustrating. And very unusual. Often dinosaur stories (including press releases of mine) get hyped, but this was much different in magnitude.
It wasn't fair to anyone (the authors of the paper, other scientists, the general public) that a few random scientists like me were sent copies of the paper before it was published. But the genie could not go back into the bottle once the @NewYorker story came out.
But today everybody can finally read the paper, and I am very much looking forward to the crowd-sourced opinions of *everyone*. There is a real thrill and a real mystery around this discovery, and it is EXCITING! Let's see where the evidence leads...
