LAUSR

The paper, Vermeesch and Tian (2014), henceforth referred to as VT, compares two programs (one developed by each of the current authors) available for inverse modelling of thermochronological data. VT states two goals. “First, it provides a ‘glimpse under the bonnet’ of these two ‘black boxes’ and second, it presents an objective and independent comparison of both programs”. We were both invited to review the original manuscript of this paper, but declined, in large part due to other commitments. Additionally, neither of us uses the other's software, and we believe we would not have been able to give an adequately informed opinion on both. We suggest overall that it should be more productive to have independent reviewers, ideally users familiar with both pieces of software and the principles underlying each. However, as published, VT does not consider fundamental aspects of both modelling approaches, and their comparison highlights both how not to use the software and how not to approach the inverse modelling problem. Unsupported anecdotal statements are widespread and many are unclear, selective, misleading or just wrong. Consequently, the purpose of this comment is to try to clarify, qualify, or correct some of the more important of these statements.