The late William Safire was a much-admired conservative political columnist who wrote for the New York Times. Most of his columns were about politics but on Sundays he wrote a second column entitled “On Language.” In this he devoted himself to his love of writing and language in general. We recall that in every first column of any new year he would describe all the grammatical and syntaxial mistakes that he himself had made during the previous year. There were always a lot of them. His point was clear. If a fine writer, such as he, could make so many mistakes, then it must be that that everybody did the same. It was nothing to be ashamed of; just get on with trying to improve your writing. Recently we have been writing about our columns in the same vein. Yes, we have made mistakes, but it is not something that we, as scientists, should be ashamed of. We should just get on with it, correct ourselves and go on to try to do better.

So, let’s admit to another mistaken column – a bad one.

Take a look at our photo. We first published this on Apr. 14th in 2023. We had been publishing a series of columns that were describing the geology of the quarry at Opus 40 near Woodstock. We looked at this specimen and thought we saw a zig zagging pattern of left and right leg prints. When we searched the literature, we found that this matched what would be expected for modern day centipedes and that is what we argued in our column. These would have been very big centipedes and that made it a remarkable find. We wanted that to be true.

But we were wrong. We sent this photo off to the facebook page “Ichnology” and soon got a response. An expert on Devonian fossil plants pointed out two more “leg prints.” Take another look at the small arrows on the right center of our photo. We had missed these. Centipedes don’t have these extra prints. This was actually the root of a fossil plant and those “prints’ had grown out of it. See our second photo.

Our mistake was at least partially forgivable. You can understand us missing those two extra marks; they are inconspicuous, to say the least. Also, we have never found any other plant fossils anywhere in the Opus 40 quarry. We just weren’t thinking about plants as we wandered around. This is still the only one we know of. But we did make one serious mistake. You see, we WANTED to believe that these were centipede tracks. That would have been a very interesting and perhaps even important discovery and we wanted that. A scientist should always be careful when “discovering” something that he or she wants to discover. Alarms must sound and red lights should be flashing. We thought we were being careful, and we had been - just not careful enough.

PS – You should be watching for these sorts of fossil roots. If you think that you have found one, then send us a photo.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskills Geologist.  Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”