[JasonC]

The most revealing line in the article "There aren't many places in the Pacific where you can recover sediments". In other words, we looked and looked, and this is the only place we found evidence the temperature was what the models said it was supposed to be. New meaning to "data mining"...

[cogitator]

Incorrect, JasonC (haven't seen you around for awhile). Due to plate tectonics and the subduction of seafloor sediments, finding areas where you can recover sediments that preserve the time of interest is NOT easy. I don't think there are any seafloor sediments older than 200 million years because of subduction (but I could be wrong). Because of the years that the ocean drilling program has been going on, scientists have a pretty good idea now what areas have sediments that are relevant to particular times in past geological history. So they probably knew in advance that this area had sediments that were in the 55 million year-old time range, but if they didn't have samples from this time period before, that made it a good target for drilling.

[Doctor Stochastic]

The most revealing line in the article "There aren't many places in the Pacific where you can recover sediments".

Quote mining alert. You didn't even quote the whole sentence. "There aren't many places in the Pacific where you can recover sediments of this age in which the fossils are not so recrystallized that they've lost their original geochemical signatures," Zachos said. Your misquotation changes the meaning of the original.