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Thank you for taking the time to address the reviewer's comments in such detail, I am delighted to accept the manuscript in its amended form.
[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Laura Wilson, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]
Both Reviewers have provided some outstanding editorial suggestions that should be addressed prior to resubmission.
The comments from Reviewer One are straightforward and can easily be addressed.
The comments from Reviewer Two are very extensive but can be summarised as:
1) Provide a clearer description of the study area, including several additional references and perhaps amended figures.
2) Address points 1-5 in the "Regarding Conclusions" section of the uploaded review.
3) Amend the figures as per suggestions in the "Regarding Figures" section in the uploaded review.
I advise revising rather than removing the discussion of sediment source areas.
This manuscript reports important new data on detrital zircon geochronology of Cretaceous terrestrial units in the North American Western Interior Basin. The authors report high-quality data, with excellent figure quality, and as a whole, this should be published in PeerJ.
The methodology through which new data were obtained , reported, and discussed are excellent throughout.
High quality data analysis and presentation throughout.
I did find a few minor faults to bring up:
Line 54: McElwain & Sageman (2010) are not included in the references.
Lines 65-66: Delete the sentence referring to Albright & Titus (2016). Meaning is unclear.
Lines 68 to72: This goes to the heart of this contribution. Two other relevant papers on this approach are Ross et al. (2017) in Science China Earth Sciences 60:44-57, and Joeckel et al. (2019) in Geol. Soc. London Spec. Pub. 498:75-100.
Line 105:Adamkin is misspelled.
Pages 20 and 22: The meaning of citations of Cilliers et al. 2018 unpublished data are unclear. Should this be included?
Lines 936 to 953: The citations of Hook et al. are out of alphabetic order.
I commend the authors for an excellent contribution to the problem of improving the chronostratigraphic understanding of Cretaceous terrestrial strata in the North American Western Interior Basin. The writing shows an impressive command of the historical development of the relevant scientific literature--almost to the point of distraction with lists of parenthetic citations that extend for several lines of text. This is thorough documentation, but disrupts the narrative--something to think about.
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