To be fair, yelling out that you have been accepted by Science or Nature is much less likely to lead to an embarrising misunderstanding.
Here’sNational Geographic’s article on it, which also mentions criticism. However, the criticism seems to come mostly from people who have not seen the site or the article, rather than those who have.
But it’s about palaeontology ! Digging is de rigeur!
Certainly, that comment is wrong. It says:
The misconception seems to be based on the fact that only one dinosaur bone is cited in the PNAS article. From National Geographic:
On the other hand, if that is correct, then UC Berkeley and the Science Daily article based on it also include details not found in the PNAS article:
Note “dinosaurs” is plural.
He hit bedrock quite a while back. 
No need to stop there:
“Keep straight on… give my regards to the earth’s core!”
*-- Basil Fawlty, “Communication Problems”, *Fawlty Towers
I disliked the New Yorker ‘fluff’ also, but for more of an editorial reason. The content was in depth and superb, so kudos are warranted especially to the author for communicating so much dense info to a general reader was well done. What I disliked was the constant hopscotching all over in time between present, past, data, past, data, present…it felt more to me, as a reader, like essay padding to reach a word count rather than substance.
For fascinating bits, I loved the description of the fragility of the specimens and the careful steps needed to try and preserve them for removal. It makes me wonder how many great discoveries simply crumble to dust unawares.
Thank you. It must have been released just minutes ago. I had been checking all day and had that exact link to the paper on the PNAS site, but was getting “access denied” all day until just now.
There is a clearer photo of this specimen in the full paper that is even more suggestive of an angled trajectory for the tektite.
I just finished reading it. It’s clear that this paper is focused on documenting the most significant aspect of the site, that it was a deposit laid down within minutes or hours of the asteroid impact. There’s no attempt to analyze the fauna or flora in detail, except to document that it includes both marine and terrestrial species. The mention of the dinosaur bone in the appendix is in the context of saying it was not killed in the event but was from a dead individual and floated there. There is no mention of mammal burrows or other dinosaurs.
But that’s fine, because that’s not the focus of this paper. Now the fact that the deposit may contain dinosaur remains and mammal burrows is cool, but it’s not the outstanding scientific finding of the paper. People who are complaining that it’s just about “a bunch of fish,” and doesn’t describe heaps of dead dinosaurs are idiots.
It’s indeed a fascinating find, though I don’t know if the title of the New Yorker’s article is quite accurate. The meteor impact in the Gulf of Mexico almost certainly contributed to the demise of dinosaurs, but I’ve read that there’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that volcanic activity - from where else, the Deccan Traps - probably contributed as well.
That controversy has been running for decades. As the article says, the eruptions are thought to have played a supporting role, but not to have been decisive in the extinctions. And even those two studies cited differ in their conclusions, with one dating the peak eruptions to after the KT event.
Something that has been bugging me about this is the terminal velocity of the microtektites–it seemed odd that they could be travelling fast enough to penetrate the mud like that. I did a quick and dirty calculation using 3 mm for the diameter of the penetrator (per the article) and the density of window glass (good enough for a rough figure) and I get a 3 mm spherical tektite with a terminal velocity of around 60 miles per hour. So, 1/10th or less the muzzle velocity of a bullet, 1/4 the muzzle velocity of a slow BB (or about 3x the speed of a fast raindrop.)
Another idiot take on the paper. As I said, the point of the PNAS paper was to document that the site was from immediately after the asteroid impact. Complaining how the paper doesn’t contain everything mentioned in the New Yorker article is moronic.
The New Yorker article makes a big deal of the “3 meter gap” of dinosaur remains below the KT boundary, but some scientists question such a gap occurs at all. And in 2011, a ceratopsian horn was found with 13 cm of the boundary. Aside from a few advocates of the volcanism hypothesis who have a special case to plead, most paleontologists believe dinosaurs were present up to the KT event. While the fact that there were a variety of dinosaur remains found at Tanis is cool, it is not nearly the most significant aspect of the site. In any case, it was necessary to establish that Tanis actually represents the KT boundary before the fact that dinosaur remains were found there take on significance.
Note that this is just the initial paper. It was received for review in October 2018, and was probably being written for a couple of months before that. In due course we will get feedback from the experts about it.
A lot more work has been done since then, and there will be many more papers to come.
Thank you; commence the big PNAS jokes.
But always DOI please so we have a permalink:
10.1073/pnas.1817407116
I wish their embargo rules were stronger so we didn’t have to suffer so much fluff “science journalism” prior to the paper coming out.
(Damnit, Jim) I’m a physicist, not a paleontologist, but I’d expect a find of this magnitude to generate many papers for its discoverers, even before we get into the flurry of refutations, counter-refutations, verifications, and re-interpretations. Probably something like one paper for the site in general (what we’re getting now), and then a separate one for each individual relic.
And it’s a touch hyperbolic to call this “the single most important day in the history of the Earth”. There have been other mass extinctions, some of them larger, and some of them also caused by asteroid impacts.