You can’t imagine a civilization other than a human one? What use would the Gerboans (my theoretical Gerbil-based civilization) have had for ceramics? We should look for their tiny exercise wheels, not grand temples, weapons, and other human affectations.
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You sound more joyful than pained, at the opportunity presented.
as the post says IF they industrialized. IF.
and IF they were land based. It’s not like we’ve mapped the oceans the way we have our own streets.
When this subject came up in another venue recently, a geologist pointed out that use of nuclear technology would alter not only the balance of nuclear materials available to be mined but also the proportion of radio-nucleides in the environment, producing an unmistakable signature in the geological record, according to them.
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There ISN’T evidence that lizard people DIDN’T exist, so…
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Of course, we had to build our civilization up using oil and coal, because they’d completely used all the slood.
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Respectfully, I think you’re missing the point of the manuscript. It was not to prove or disprove the existence of a previous civilization. It was to come up with a method to derive a testable hypothesis about whether or not a previous civilization could have existed. After all, a testable hypothesis is the bedrock of all scientific inquiry.
Everything that you posit about industrial chemical products and low earth orbit could be testable hypotheses. The authors are arguing that scientists like you should be deriving the hypotheses that you have and then testing them.
So good on ya- now go get that NSF funding and lets find out why the lizard people’s LEO mind control arrays have disappeared…
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Am I the only one who thinks that the Silurians look extremely, very, quite, totally similar to the Star Trek TOS alien “Gorn”?
(Wikipedia Gorn entry)
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I think you’re the only one 
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I think you’re right. If there was some creature capable of civilization, we would have found if not that animal, but the early animal leading up to do it. Meaning the equivalent to homo erectus or even an early chimp, when looking at our ancestry line. So where is the homo erectus of lizard people? I suppose if you had some super fast and hard evolution, maybe.
Also, gold is incredibly stable and even crows like shiny things. They would have made some sort of artifacts that would have been buried and left to discover someday. And depending how advanced they were, something like quarries or mines I would think would still be evident.
I think it’s an interesting idea, but unlikely. The world is more boring than we can imagine it, in some ways.
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If they ever got as far as the Moon, their stuff would still be there. I don’t know how footprints or rover tracks would weather over geologic time.
I am reminded of the book “Stranger from the depths” which I quite enjoyed as a child. https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Depths-Gerry-Turner/dp/B000NPNQLC
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I remember reading somewhere that they would eventually erode away because it isn’t a perfect vacuum there (technically it’s still within the atmosphere of the Sun). We are talking about billions of years though.
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I think the first ones were the Trumpists. That’s why they are so clever now…
“EVOLUTION” 
We only have ready access to the possible descendants of the hypothetical creature. The behaviour of some birds sometimes suggests to me an echo of a much different past. Bower birds, for instance . Their behaviour seems to parallel in some ways the modern lounge lizard mating dance; furnish a cool batchelor pad with rare and shiny objects, the only purpose of said pad is to get laid. The actual laying of the progeny occurs elsewhere. The dense packing of the neurons in avain brains also allows one to speculate that their ancient precursors may have had cognitive abilities greater than is usually supposed of them
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I’d imagine it would be pretty hard to build a civilization without fire. But then again, that is from my wholly terrestrial perspective.
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There’s a fun set of short stories by Cixin Liu (of The Three Body Problem fame) that focus on a pre-human civilization of intelligent ants and dinosaurs. Worth a read.
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Ah, you presume that these creatures won’t evolve their way out of the oceans! Dolphins made it back in, and Octopus already make short trips out of the water.
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One of my favorite classic SF stories is the Blish novella Surface Tension. A water planet has been seeded with microscopic water dwelling humans. They have enough records to know there’s such things as chemistry and metallurgy, but it’s hard to develop immersed in the universal solvent.
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