Comment on a paper by Schito et al. (2017) “Thermal evolution of Paleozoic successions of the Holy Cross Mountains (Poland)”

The paper by Schito et al. (2017) contains many misquotations of the regional literature on the Holy Cross Mountains, that may confuse the reader. Present comment suggests more appropriate references related to the stratigraphic, tectonic and palaeothermal aspects of the commented paper. The burial-thermal history as interpreted by Schito et al. is based on doubtful, poorly documented or even unsubstantiated thermal maturity and stratigraphical data, ignoring important regional evidence, such as Caledonian (sub-Devonian) unconformity and Permian thermal anomaly. The 1-D modeling study performed by Schito et al. (2017) did not consider published alternative concepts of the temporal and spatial heat flow patterns. The resulting models, assuming uniformly low heat flow between the Ordovician and the earliest Cretaceous, are inconsistent with independent regional data pointing to a hotter Variscan (Carboniferous-Permian) thermal regime.