Scientific mud flies over dinosaur footprints

Scientific mud flies over dinosaur footprints

Randy Boswell
CanWest News Service

Thursday, April 12, 2007

A University of Alberta scientist’s once-in-a-lifetime dinosaur discovery in Croatia has turned into a nightmare after a rival team of European researchers raced to the site of the find and published their own study — without crediting the Canadian and his colleagues.

The dispute has exploded in the pages of the Nature, one of the world’s leading science publications, with U of A paleontologist Michael Caldwell decrying the “intellectual theft” of his team’s discovery of 10 fossilized footprints from a 95-million-year-old titanosaur.

The trackway was found during a 2004 research project — funded partly by the Canadian government agency NSERC and National Geographic — on the Croatian island of Hvar. Caldwell was leading a search by scientists from the Edmonton university and Croatia’s main natural history museum for traces of prehistoric marine lizards when they “stumbled” upon the trail of 30-centimetre-long dinosaur footprints along a rocky shoreline that was once limestone mud.

The long-necked, plant-eating titanosaurs were among the largest of the dinosaurs, up to 20 metres in length and weighing 10 tonnes. The discovery on Hvar — which has helped prove the island was linked to North Africa before drifting to its present position off the Balkan coast — was particularly significant because it was the first dinosaur discovery in the region and it added millions of years to the time frame of the species’ existence.

Caldwell and his team announced the discovery at a press conference in the Croatian capital of Zagreb in 2004. Team members had been compiling research results for a planned journal article when they learned in January they’d been “scooped” by a competing group of scientists.

Led by University of Zagreb paleontologist Aleksander Mezga, a team of four Croatian scientists and one Swiss researcher published an eight-page article about the Hvar titanosaur tracks in the December edition of the British-based scientific journal Cretaceous Research.

The article trumpets the discovery with a string of superlatives, proclaiming it the first dinosaur footprint find along the Croatian coast, as well as the “geologically youngest” and largest specimens ever found in the area.

There was no mention of the Canadian-Croatian team’s discovery of the site. And while Mezga told Nature that “every single word” of the journal article “is our intellectual property,” he admitted making no attempt to contact Caldwell and his team prior to publication.
“If they had mentioned us by name, it would have been clear they were publishing our discovery,” Caldwell told CanWest News Service on Thursday. “They avoided doing so for obvious reasons.”

Caldwell said he expects “sanctions will be forthcoming” and that the parent company of the journal, Elsevier, is considering his team’s demand for a formal retraction of the article.

Asked if reporting of a discovery is subject to time limits, Caldwell replied by e-mail: “Absolutely not — no time limits in paleontology. In fact, Mezga and his team submitted their manuscript before we had gotten the permits from the Croatian Ministry of Science to remove the specimens and rock samples from the country.

“We failed to do nothing — except to realize we were being scooped.”