Omar Rafael Regalado Fernández

Can we start using “Epstein class” to describe scientists? 🤔

I've been shouting this from the rooftops (and a podcast, and a book) since 2019.

One extremely frustrating iteration is the people who say "Yeah, that was true of the 2021 models, but not today's models".

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The Epstein Files and Paleontology This episode is a little different than our normal content. There are several paleontologists mentioned in the latest release of the Epstein files, and the official response to that has been...…

If you are also dealing with a sense of betrayal, I think this is a good listen.

Scientific societies (plural) have failed us because they are, in the end, still behaving like boys' clubs.

Also TW about the incident in SVP24 Minneapolis.

pca.st/episode/d8b6...

Keep the focus, and keep the pressure on. It’s irrelevant whether Horner was wrong about T. rex or Torosaurus or sexual selection or whatever. There is a clear pattern of behavior here and making this about theoretical disputes is a distraction. Paleontology has to get serious about cleaning house.

Famed paleontologist, Chapman lecturer appears in latest Epstein files release Emails show that Jack Horner visited Jeffrey Epstein's New Mexico ranch in 2012 and 2016 before he was hired as a lecturer at Chapman University.

I dug into the Epstein files for this story.

Jack Horner visited Epstein at Zorro Ranch in 2012, emails show. He later thanked “the girls” as hosts.

Now a Chapman U fellow, Horner regrets using the term in emails.

The university is looking into the files.
www.latimes.com/socal/daily-...

A big take-home message: most field work is organised and led by men, and men are bad at ensuring the physiological needs of their students are met.

Male scientists still find natural phenomena like menstruation and maternity to be taboo.

While no harassment in international forums has been experienced by the 39 women asked, half of them have experienced some sort of discrimination during the peer review or publication process.

64.1% considered that age also plays a factor in how they are treated and seen by their colleagues.

Of the 39 women asked, 72% has experienced some misogynistic in nature harassment. 22 have experienced psychological or verbal harassment in academia. 5 have experienced sexual harassment. Gender and race are intertwined in the type of harassment experienced.

"the study proposes the creation of a support network for Mexican women paleontologists to help promote safer, more inclusive, and more collaborative environments"

"The results indicate that the barriers of gender and race do not operate independently; rather, they tend to overlap and reinforce one another, affecting women’s training, continuity, and recognition within the discipline."

"In addition, the near absence of Indigenous women and people with disabilities among the respondents reflects deeper inequalities related to access to education and scientific opportunities."

"The study also found that combining motherhood with a scientific career is particularly difficult: caring for children, managing household responsibilities, and meeting academic demands creates pressures that hinder professional development."

From the non-technical abstract

"To better understand these issues, a survey was conducted with 39 women involved in the study of fossils. Their responses show that many have experienced harassment, sexist comments, or mistreatment, especially during fieldwork (...)"

New paper to reflect on during the International Women in Science Day.
🧪⛏️⚒️🦕🦖
"Barriers Affecting Mexican Women in Paleontology: Challenges and Proposals for Building a Women’s Support Network"

paleontologiamexicana.geologia.unam.mx/index.php/pa...

The billion-dollar case for sustaining palaeontology’s digital databases - Nature Ecology & Evolution The authors survey community palaeontological databases, documenting their contributions to science as well as their vulnerabilities, and provide recommendations for the future of open science databas...

🚨 Hot off the press: Our look into of the palaeontological database landscape and its sustainability into the future.

Palaeo databases are invaluable and continue to transform our research field - but they are vulnerable... (1/6) 🧪 ⛏️

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New on Disney is Jumanji. I never watched this film outside Mexico.

And here I am flabbergasted, that the OV has always had the Mexican National Anthem in the background in the gun shop scene?

Does anyone know why??

The gag aged like milk in the Chihuahuan desert.

Mostly because nationality terms in English are wrongly used as interchangeable with ethnicity. So Mexicans think correctly of themselves as Mexican nationals but then are forced into the "Mexican ethnicity" bin, and they play the part.

I must say I have only seen that dissonance from afar. Many times, when I encountered people in that situation, they take offense in that "they don't look Mexican" because the interlocutor is assuming Mexican=brown, so they are seeing racism but through a disenfranchising lens.

Those people quickly identify as either mestizo, the "casta" that corresponds to a "pure blood" Spaniard marrying an Indigenous person, or simply as Spaniard.

In Mexico, during the Independence war, this system was viewed as an imperial symbol and pushed to get rid of it. They pretty much failed

The eugenics in Latin America has a different flavour. There is a saying that goes: "think about improving the breed when marrying". For Hispanics, race is something you are and something you aspire to be. It comes from the strict caste system imposed on the Spanish and Portuguese colonies.

People with Hispanic names are joining ICE because they are white supremacists. They blame the racism towards them on the communities with Hispanic names that are not white and they want to ethnically cleanse their white names.

They thrive on that confusion. Unlearn the propaganda.

It drives me crazy that US journalists and commentators say stuff like "he was a white supremacist but his name was non-European: García". García is a Spanish name, brought to the Americas by Spain, a country in Europe. A fact the supremacist knows and embraces.

Learnt racism preventing learning

Lol Ah the made up world fascists live in... this is not a left-right issue. Everyone in the Spanish-speaking world sees América as a continent. In fact, several countries even use “estadounidense” (United-Statian). This is about history and cartography. Plus, before 1898 loads of Americans agreed

Also, the antagonist in También la lluvia is the Bechtel Corp., and in my head, that's the reason the anti- part is washed down. Those colonialists built the Euro-Tunnel and were rebuilding Iraq, you couldn't make people go look too much into that company in 2010.

YouTube video by Shawn Grenier | The Canvas When Europeans Try To Make Anticolonial Movies

I enjoyed this video-essay on historical self-righteousness and anticolonialism.

Also timely about the movie "También la lluvia", which would help you understand the Republican regime's obsession with Columbus.

youtu.be/6lBcdJOQUVo

I also asked (bothered) him because my suspition-meter got to a 100 when I saw we were getting into Online Etymology territory in the discussion.

Also sore topic since we spent a fair amount discussing this pre-Cretaceous angiosperms issue at our journal club last Friday.

We haven't moved on 😅

This is truly baffling. A seed does not become an angiosperm fruit only because there are some vague lines on it. It is the equivalent of having a full diapsid skull and saying you found Permian dinosaurs...

First, I want to be very clear that I am not speaking in any official capacity for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) with this post. I’ll be speaking of the society of course, but this is not an organizational official statement. I’m also not going to speak super directly to the details of the Epstein Files revelations that erupted over the weekend and still continue. I believe the stories I’ve heard from numerous female SVP members about other behaviors, words and actions by accused individuals and many other men. There should be a robust Ethics Committee investigation that includes the possibility of bannings and revocations as potential consequences for a totality of offenses both recent and otherwise. This goes for any SVP member, not just those with outsized influence or media presence. Communications Committee (which I am co-chair of) was not involved in crafting the statement released by SVP earlier this week. We are discussing how to better integrate relevant committees in future situations that require precise, expeditious official commentary from SVP. While the technical legalistic language in that statement is correct, IMO it severely missed the mark on understanding and acknowledging the hurt and anger amongst membership. The community response appeared to be in part driven by decades of women in membership feeling their real experiences with harassment, objectification, and assault continue to be minimized and ignored. Due to structural inequities, legal fears and power imbalances we especially see influential repeat-offenders relegated to whisper-network warnings rather than face any true professional or personal consequences. As anyone with a shred of empathy can understand, this has over time led to intense and even angry frustration, members quitting the society, and others avoiding membership altogether.

Despite robust cultural and operational changes within SVP over the past 20+ years, the outcomes we are experiencing are still deeply problematic. If the outcomes are chronically proven inadequate, that means the systems producing those outcomes are inadequate, and should be fixed where appropriate or thrown out in favor of a complete rebuild. I have not arrived at these conclusions lightly. I have been in private conversation with current and former SVP members (mostly women) nearly constantly since this past Sunday. Everyone from students who only joined very recently, early careers expressing dismay at the silence of more senior figures, established mid-career members, and those who have left membership in frustration. The act of leadership relies most on listening, and I’ve been doing my best to do that where I can this week. In light of this assessment, and with the help of extensive dialogue which I am immensely grateful for, I have submitted the following action items to SVP leadership to be included in discussion at an upcoming followup town hall meeting: 1) Strongly consider an overhaul to our Code of Conduct rules regarding interpersonal behavior, ethics reporting, and ethics violation policies within the bounds of technical legal protections required for all parties. This includes but is not limited to banning from meetings, banning from society membership, and revocation of Society awards as official potential consequences. If our current systems for dealing with abusive or unprofessional behavior are not getting the job done, we should fix them. 2) Assemble comprehensive, expansive strategies that SVP leadership can implement with the goal of addressing the underlying unprofessional actions and attitudes that lead to misconduct behaviors propagating in our community. In function, the goal is to educationally inoculate against toxic and unprofessional behaviors.

3) SVP will produce a media series that guides members through the full start-to-finish ethics violation reporting and administrative action processes. We believe empowering membership with this information will help us all hold each other accountable and make SVP as safe and welcoming as possible to those wishing to contribute to the betterment of our professional community. (This one is more directly under my control and thus I can speak more assertively about it.) 4) SVP should provide quarterly progress updates on initiatives to address member safety as well as violation accountability procedures. This *would not* mean a change in policy for public disclosures on the details of ongoing ethics violation investigations. It will mean providing members with updates on process overhauls and finding new ways to provide allowable transparency to membership without creating legal vulnerabilities. We are a society of incredibly smart, talented, generous and hardworking people. Circumstantial excuses do not protect our community members. These chronic problems are fixable if we have the collective will to do so. Thanks for your time if you made it all the way through. I look forward to working with anyone with good-faith interest in making the changes our organization clearly still needs.

Regarding events of last week in SVP and the wider vertebrate paleontology community.

They wrote their emails thinking they were never going to be caught.

They write their excuses because they are sorry they got caught.

★"The trip actually took place in South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where collecting fossils on reservation land without explicit tribal permission is considered looting."