Caleb Brown proposed to Lorna O’Brien in the acknowledgements of a 2015 paper describing a horned dinosaur nicknamed Hellboy.COURTESY CALEB BROWNOn a starlit night in Arizona in 2014, Joanna Schug handed Kunio Sayanagi a research proposal. Schug, a behavioral scientist at the College of William and Mary, had been carrying the proposal around in her bag for more than a month, but she could never find the right time for the handoff. Sitting on the hood of a car under the dark desert sky, the moment felt right.
This was no ordinary collaboration agreement. The document proposed “a long-term research study to examine the impact of a marital union on future happiness over the course of the rest of our lifetimes.” Preliminary data, depicted in a graph, showed a steady increase in happiness since the scientists became a couple.
He nervously waited for her to reach the acknowledgements, where he’d written, “Lorna, will you marry me?”
Sayanagi, a planetary scientist at Hampton University, enthusiastically agreed, and formally sealed the deal with a “letter of commitment” hidden inside a Valentine’s Day bouquet a few of months later. The pair then coauthored a research paper titled “The effects of an encounter of Joanna and Kunio: A wedding celebration.”
The manuscript, alas, only appeared in the ...
