Bigfoot from Wyoming: The largest dinosaur foot found yet

Hey! I published on something, 18 years after I started the paper.

The awesome scientific article is here on PeerJ's website, open access for anyone to read and download. As far as I can tell, it's gotten almost 8000 reads so far, so not too shabby! I also did a companion blog post for them where you can read all kinds of information on why exactly it took 20 years from discovery to publication. Short version of the story: I got a job and it wasn't a huge priority to me.

KUVP 129716 "Annabelle". Bigfoot was found under the tail.

As someone that has to self-fund all my research projects, publication costs are a real issue. I wanted to go open-access as I think making another company richer by giving them the fruits of my labor (on a public specimen) is kinda wrong, but there are some expenses in order to publish it properly. I simply don't have the free cash to do that.

More brachiosaur material from the site, me for scale.

Then came February. I had already assembled a small team of experts to finally move the project along, as I was getting tired of constipating science. Emanuel Tschopp and Femke Holwerda were Team Europe, and David Burnham and Myself were Team Kansas. We had no idea where we would publish but we had already begun preparing measurements and basic text. PeerJ surprisingly had a special promotion for their 5th anniversary offering to waive publication costs for articles submitted during that month. That was an offer too hard to pass up, but could we do it?

Archaeopteryx gawks at the metatarsals

The writing crew huddled over Google Hangouts and assembled a pretty decent draft in just 2 weeks (!!!) complete with figures for submission. Femke referred to it as "Rambo Writing" and I don't think it's too far off the mark as a description. We submitted it and waited.

Making the model of the MT IV

In a few weeks we heard back: Accepted with minor revisions. Minor except we had to refigure all of the original bones. So off I went to Kansas with Triebold Paleontology Inc's Artec Spider scanner and 3D render rig. Not included in the paper (but existing) are complete 3D models of every bone on this foot. Contact KUVP if you need access for research, I think they came out pretty well.

Completed model of MT II

After that, things went pretty well! We resubmitted and it was just a very short time between then and it coming out to the world. Press was also pretty kind (though they kept referring to me as "Dr." and thought it was a footprint instead of an actual foot). Heck, I made it into Newsweek! Pretty wild.

In the news(week)!

Why didn't we say it's definitely from Brachiosaurus? Simple: No Morrison Formation Brachiosaurus specimen has ever had any pes material recovered with it, so we didn't have any overlapping elements to compare with. Could it be Brachiosaurus? Sure, even probably, but we simply don't have that smoking gun just yet.