diplotomodon.bsky.social𓅽

Macbeth: SHIT

I cut loose from Twitter specifically so I wouldn't have to see stuff like Sam Neill melted by the de-agifying laser beam. Please refrain from posting Sam Neill melted by the de-agifying laser beam

I don't know if anyone has ever written a book arguing for the seperation of the United States into three or four sequential Republics, but you absolutely can -- and arguably should -- think of the country that way

@jon_bois a football player carries the ball to the 49 yard line, then the 50 yard line. however, after taking another step forward, he finds to his astonishment that he is once again at the 49 yard line. but how can this be? this is the grand riddle of football

Haddy looks good in gold

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.

ACAB includes the ref at the Puppy Bowl

We are increasingly finding that the friction of social interaction was a load bearing part of society

One step closer to those Permian bears... @tetzoo.bsky.social

First time the Horner association has been mentioned in a non-Montana news outlet I think

Just because good news is worth celebrating:

There is now a Prep medication that is an *every six month* injection.

HIV has, effectively, a vaccination.

The first and last time I ordered "thin crust" pizza in Chicago they cut a round pie into 2-inch squares and every single one of them tasted like cardboard

Velociraptors had feathers

A stuffed striped carnivore very loosely resembling a coyote and roughly the same size stands on a table. It is a light reddish brown with stripes going down its back. It has a band around its center from a sample being taken from it for genetic testing. Thylacinus cynocephalus Photo taken at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University.

The tail of a Thylacine. The tail is somewhat thinner than usual but it loosely resembles an opossum tail with some characteristics of a dog tail. Not shown is the pouch, which is a reverse, rear facing pouch that carries the young in females and the testicles in males. The back is striped prominently.

The head of the Thylacine. It superficially resembles a canid but has notable differences in shape and teeth layout. It was a carnivore and preyed primarily on small animals in Australia and New Guinea. These larger, more mainland populations went extinct some 3,000 years ago, possibly from competition with dingoes and humans although it remains unclear, with the Tasmanian population lasting until the mid 20th century. Native Tasmanians lived alongside them with minimal competition and there were no dingoes or other placentals to further compete with them. European colonizers blamed them for loss of sheep, although it’s debatable how often they actually took domestic livestock, and heavily persecuted them, along with Native Tasmanians and Wedge-Tailed Eagles, Aquila audax. The last known Thylacine died in captivity in Hobart and while sightings persisted into the 21st Century there is no proof that these animals survived much later than that last captive animal.

Another not quite #FossilFriday
The Thylacine, Thylacinus cynocephalus, aka Tasmanian Tiger, aka the Tasmanian Wolf, is a recently extinct species of carnivorous marsupial, the largest to survive into modern times. It was heavily persecuted by European colonists and the last known one died in 1937.

Maybe a bit late for web timing, but ehy, NEW PAPER ON #fossilfriday!!!

I am proud to present you Haolong dongi gen. nov. sp. nov., a new hadrosauroid from the Early Cretaceous of China!
The specimen, almost complete, is a juvenile iguanodontian from the Yixian Formation of the Barremian (125 Mya).

Five presumably anterior caudals of a sauropod dinosaur affixed to a wall in a difficult-to-reach-and-photograph position.

Some mystery sauropod caudals at the Rutgers Geology Museum - anyone want to take a guess? (The mid-century label out of frame tells us they're from Wyoming, and offers a tentative but uncertain ID.) #FossilFriday

art depicting two haolong individuals, depicted with the unique spikey integument preserved with the holotype

a very warm welcome to haolong dongi, a fascinating hadrosauroid from the early cretaceous yixian formation described by huang et al. 🎉 the near-complete holotype preserves highly unique integumentary structures unknown in other dinosaurs
www.nature.com/articles/s41
(art by fabio manucci)

This is only related in a sideways manner, but: the story of any small slice of humanity is the story of humanity, just boiled down and distilled. So:

In 2020, we had a lot of conversations about harassment at SF/F conventions, and Isaac Asimov came up several times.

I suspect part of this is because the media landscape is much larger in general than it was 20-30 years ago

Painterly illustration of the two lobe-finned fish partially resting outside of their freshwater stream environment with muddy banks and a foggy atmosphere.

Devonian illustration for James Stryker's paleoart project featuring the sarcopterygians Tiktaalik and Panderichthys.

#Devonian #Paleoart #Paleoillustration #Illustration #Tiktaalik #Panderichthys

First thing I buy with $850 billion is probably a lawyer

I have nothing of substance to add re: the condemnation of paleo associations with Epstein, but as the initiator of one of the more recent high-profile SVP ethics cases who spent months going through their process, I have some thoughts re: SVP's handling of ethics cases/reports.

A thread 🧵:

I know it’s intentional but we should stop calling everything AI, lumping useful machine learning techniques for science with large language models that tech companies are trying to cram into everything.

For those who don't have Instagram, an update from Neil Shubin:

Just remembering how I presented the Cope/Elasmosaurus story to the John Mulaney live Netflix show for their "are we putting dinosaurs back together right" episode, successfully pitched it to three separate producers, and then was unceremoniously hung up on just so Jack Horner could ramble incoherently about his credentials for no reason

Ran out of space:

Is @societyofvertpaleo.bsky.social being serious here?
No, the presence of a name on an email doesn't establish wrongdoing. But the *content* of those emails is what so many members, including myself, are outraged about. This response does nothing but further degrade my confidence in SVP leadership

This is another one of the reasons I’m so deeply troubled by the fabulous new plan to just pivot to private philanthropy.

Billionaires will not save science

Very nice paper for those of us preserving specimens in alcohol!

I cut loose from Twitter specifically so I wouldn't have to see stuff like Sam Neill melted by the de-agifying laser beam. Please refrain from posting Sam Neill melted by the de-agifying laser beam