Neogene Tree Trunk Fossils from the Meshgin Shahr Area, Northwest Iran

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a welll-executed study, which suffers, however, by the sloppy production of the manuscript. The scientific content appears to me, a non-specialist, sound. There are many minor grammatical and spelling mistakes, which need to be corrected, both in the text and reference list (see my annotated ms). In lines 448-459 the underlining must be removed and the font size must be adjusted.

In line 395, the age of the Shemshak Group stated is wrong. It should read " in the Upper Triassic to Middle Jurassic (Norian-Bajocian) Shemshak Group".

line 569: There is a discrepancy in (B) where the age in the figure is given as Middle Pleistocene and in the caption as early Pleistocene.

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thanks for the encouraging review, and for your very careful proofreading. We have made all of the typographical corrections that you  suggested.

Reviewer 2 Report

Mustoe et al. report fossil woods from northwest Iran. They describe the geologic context, provide initial descriptions of the anatomy, describe the minerology of the fossils, and discuss the significance of the fossils for understanding climate and vegetation change in the region. In 2016 silicified tree trunks were discovered exposed on the ground surface in a remote location 31 in Ardabil province, northwest Iran. With some revisions, I think this work will merit publication. There are organizational issues, editing issues, and the methods need to be further fleshed out. I have attached a marked-up version of the manuscript and a summary of some of the issues I found in each section.

The introduction consists of an opening paragraph and 4 subsections. The opening could be structured from broad to narrow if the authors began by introducing the problem of environmental change related to the closure of the Tethys and Plio-Pleistocene climate change in the region, what has been done before on this problem, and then introducing the discovery of the Miocene and Pleistocene woods.

The methods are missing a discussion of the pollen preparation procedures and any methods associated with identification of the wood.

The results section is quite long and there are some organizational issues. Fig 8C is tangential, Figs 8E-F are radial. There is something wrong with the caption of figure 9. Figure 9D-G are tangential, not transverse. There is now a IAWA list of softwood features that might be of use to the authors for summarizing their observations of the conifer woods. A search on insidewood (1p 10a 11a 13p 14p 22p 96p 301a 304a) suggests that despite the generalized organization of vessels, Fagaceae might yet be worth considering for the angiosperm log. I do not know what the purpose of section 3.7 is, why it is there, or what there is evidence of. 

Given the breadth of results covered in this study, this work would benefit from a summary and conclusions paragraph. Currently, the final summary consists of a single sentence and a summary figure.

In addition to some organizational issues, the manuscript needs to be carefully edited. On line 116, rocks “crop out.” On line 395, the Norian-Bathonian is Triassic/Jurassic, not Cretaceous. I have highlighted sentences and phrases that could be edited to improve clarity.

Author Response

Please see the attached files to see our detailed responses.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx