Things You Can Cite Meaghan's Newest Article For!

Meaghan had a new article come out recently in Palaeo-Electronica. It's great, and you should read it!

And the authors are VERY TRUSTWORTHY and super good at SCIENCE

It's also very long! With many tables! So in lieu of you having to read the whole thing, here are the top take-away points that Meaghan thinks you should probably cite her & Edward for:

We Talked About Some Science Stuff!

This week, instead of WRITING about science stuff, we're going to show a video of us TALKING about science stuff. Specifically, Amy gave a great 15 minute talk on her Big Bend Summer internship that we belatedly blogged about like 5 minutes ago, and Meaghan gave a 45 minute talk about the poor sad oreodonts and how they spent their lives mutilating one another for fun or sex or something.

AMY'S TALK ABOUT MONKEYS* AND PARKS

MEAGHAN'S TALK ABOUT THE SAD SAD FACE BITES

Hope you enjoyed this brief diversion from our writing style to our talking style! Also, we love the sounds of our own voices so please invite us to talk more at your conferences, seminar series, house party, or nearby retirement home - trust us, we'll say yes.


*primates. Whatever.

Cenozoic Cheat Sheet

Meaghan likes to give homemade Christmas gifts. Last year she made nerdy science-themed chocolates, and the year before that she designed dorky mugs. This year, she decided to go a big more useful and create the only calendar that really matters... the Cenozoic calendar. Really, Meaghan was just kind of tired of looking up the NALMA (North American Land Mammal Ages) divisions and decided to make a cheat sheet for herself illustrated with her lab's favorite Cenozoic animals!  

Hadrianus, a big ol' tortoise

Fossils, Feral Cats, and Fire: Meaghan's Summer at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument

Spending a summer in Dayville, Oregon, probably doesn’t sound like much of a career-advancing opportunity unless you study obscure small towns or farming (or fire - we had lots of those). It’s deep in Eastern Oregon, so deep that it’s a 30+ minute drive if you want more than the canned beans and melted men’s deodorant the only store in town has to offer. The population is 145, but the age distribution is akin to a teetering, inverted triangle - I saw an order of magnitude more rattlesnakes than I did people under the age of 35. But Dayville is home to much more than cows and near-retirement ranchers: it has huge exposures of millions of consecutive years of fossil-forming layers of the Cenozoic and is a 15-minute drive from the world-renowned John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. As a paleontology doctoral student studying Cenozoic mammals, there’s no place in the world I’d rather be located (also, I conveniently like rattlesnakes).

A Lot of Oreodont Drawings

This summer Meaghan has been working as a Geocorps Paleontologist for the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, working on resolving John Day oreodont taxonomy. It's been a lot of fun, but it also means that oreodonts have been at the forefront of her mind literally all summer... so she's drawn a lot of them. As the summer has progressed, her oreodonts have become a lot more like My Little Ponies, with big feet and ridiculous expressions. Meaghan is now headed off to Kyrgyzstan for a month (to help this lady scientist with her dissertation work), and is too lazy to write blog posts ahead of time so in lieu of other blog material.... here are a bunch of Meaghan's oreodont sketches with her brilliantly witty commentary!

Coy Agrochoerus antiquus is an ass during hide-and-seek

Merychyus elegans just pranked the shit out of someone.

The Glories of Collections-Based Research

Whenever I (Meaghan) tell other people that I'm a paleontologist, people tend to get really excited and ask one or both of the following two things:

First they ask if I've heard about the newest dinosaur fossil, which I never have but usually can bluff my way through with the sentence "oh right, isn't it the biggest one they've ever found, and it's from some country in South America or Asia or Africa or something?" because 90% of what dinosaur paleontologists in the media do is basically a prolonged, scientific dick-size competition that occurs in a foreign country my American friends consider jungle-ish.

The second thing they ask is if I get to do much field work, to which I throw back my head and cackle maniacally until the happy, excited gleam in their eye fades away and leaves nothing behind but the shallow husk of their dying inner seven-year-old.

Because no, I don't, and it's totally way better that way.

I know - it seems like it doesn't get much better than this right?*

Blackout Science Rage: Proposal Edition

No introduction today, we're just going to dive right in: Meaghan recently received the following critique for a proposal requesting funding for her oreodont research.

"The premise that by examining extinct organisms we know what modern organisms are threatened is fundamentally flawed, unless you can demonstrate that the causal mechanisms are identical. Is it really the teeth that define the successful (or not) morphologies?”

Please allow Amy to nerd-translate:

"Studying dead critters to understand modern living critters is horse shit unless you can show that they were influenced by the exact same forces. Do funny shaped teeth really determine the success of certain oreodonts?"

Originally when Meaghan read this she didn't get past the first sentence because she flew into a paleo-rage; upon second glance she is still a grumpy Gus but less likely to make noises that make her roommates think she is possessed by demons or possibly hoarding a room full of cats in heat.

1800's Paleontologists Say the Darndest Things

The best part of lit review is the google images.

Meaghan has been doing a lot of literature review lately. This requires a lot of scouring the back pages of Google Scholar for 200-year old articles, and whining incessantly to her office mate about how people from the 1800's couldn't cite each other (stop making up page numbers and publication dates, Cope!!!). It's sort of like dumpster diving at a really boring library. But sometimes there are gems amidst the miasma of scientific horse shit, and Meaghan presents to you now some of the more bizarre things she's found recently in the dung pile that is Oreodont Taxonomy.

Where's the Vengeance Team?

Yes, dear readers, we are still alive despite the pit of Carkoon known as "editing a rap song when you know nothing about rapping." Resting gracefully on the event horizon of total musical despair, we decided to take a break to fill you in a little bit on what's new in the Vengeance Household!

First and foremost, science. Meaghan and Amy recently(ish) went to Berkeley to collect data on oreodonts and omomyids. Meaghan has been doing a lot of preliminary research on character variation in oreodonts and in camelids, so spent most of her time measuring skull after skull after skull, as well as taking pictures to do some geometric morphometric analyses. Amy spent some time measuring itty bitty adorable primate teeth fossils, but mostly was finishing up her thesis so spent most of her time crumpled over her computer cursing at Mesquite, a phylogenetic software program.

We managed to also get some climbing in, heading to Smith Rock, Yosemite, and Indian Rock State Parks for Meaghan's first multi-pitch and some awesome bouldering. Meaghan and Amy shared a tandem rapel, which was made even more special by the lovely song that Amy serenaded Meaghan with the whole way down.

Meaghan is the milk in Amy's cocoa puffs, apparently

Meaghan just won prizes at the 3 Minute Thesis competition and the Graduate Student Research Forum, while Amy passed her Honors College thesis with distinction (ahem, the highest honor) and moved to Denali National Park, where she will be working for the Park Service finding and mapping Cretaceous dinosaur trackways. This summer Meaghan will be working as a field biologist, but will be interspersing that with a trip to the Chicago Field Museum as well as a trip to the American Museum of Natural History, courtesy of the Teddy Roosevelt Grant she's received. So while Vengeance Team North tracks dinosaurs, Vengeance Team South going to molest oreodonts.

View A Summer of Science! in a larger map

 But don't fret, dear readers - the blog will not be abandoned. Not even for fossils. Meaghan is still hard at work on editing the sloth rap into something that is funny and not just horribly, horribly cringe-worthy (RAPPING IS REALLY HARD GUYS!), and Amy is working on a few posts about the sequester suckitude and how she hasn't yet gotten eaten by bears in Alaska. We're also working on figuring out google chat to schedule a few more interviews, compiling all the worst possible scientific concepts you can google with your safe search filter off, and drawing ancient fish carrying basketballs (it will make sense, just trust us).

But in the meantime, here is an excellent youtube video you should all enjoy about a cat experiencing ennui.

And if you liked the Sloth Rap Battle trailer before, imagine how much you'll love the extended version! Hint: you'll love it a lot. Like... a whole hell of a lot.

A Letter to Meaghan's Mom

Okay, Mom. Sit down, this is going to be a whirlwind. 

First off, this is an oreodont:

Cute, right?

Don't get too attached: they're dead now, as of about 5ish million years ago, but for most of the Cenozoic they were all over North America and about as common as deer, possums, or hippies are today. Their fossils were called the most common Cenozoic fossil of North America, a quote by  Malcolm Rutherford Thorpe (an old dead guy your daughter has a science crush on) that Meaghan rides pretty hard for grant proposals.

Point is, these guys were everywhere, but their taxonomy is all sorts of disagreeable. You know how Dad used to get into fights with our family friends every Thanksgiving about which type of wood was best to burn, using no evidence except his own personal volume? Yeah, it's sort of like that - people don't really know how all the oreodonts are related to one another, but some people have some really strong opinions that they haven't backed up with things they've published. They say that one group is related to another group because of some funny tooth shape or skull bone, but there's no evidence that those differences are any more important to these species than our hair color is to us.

Different species of Lohans?

So your brilliant, super amazing, totally hireable-in-the-future daughter is using lots of math to find out which bones and shapes can say a species is a species, then she's going to rewrite the family tree of this group. But why, you most undoubtedly are asking, Why, Meaghan, does anybody care? Well other than because you LOVE ME, Mom, lets revisit the whole "most common fossil in the Cenozoic of North America" thing. Fossils are useful for loads of things, but since you like living animals lets talk about those.

Endangered and Adorable

See these guys? Yeah, they're dying out, and sometimes we don't always know why. Science can do a lot of things, but predicting the future is typically pretty difficult for it (see weather reports for details). To understand what things are making animals go extinct now, we need to know what made them go extinct in the past. Are there certain features that make a creature go extinct more readily? Which environments are more likely to lose members? 

Well, we've got about 40 million years of watching oreodonts go nuts with their evolution and still fail to make it. Knowing why they died out can help us look for weak points in our modern ecosystems, and pinpoint which features spell Welcome to the Danger Zone to an adaptable, adorable hooved animal like the ones above. Evolutionary trends of the past 50 million years probably are repeating today, we just have to be able to find them. And to find them, we have to better understand how common organisms were related to one another, and how they changed over time.

Boom, Mom. That's the sound of your mind being blown by how awesome your daughter is.

Also have I mentioned lately how super intelligent and amazing and gorgeous you are? Because you're the best. And like, super nice. And cool. And amazing. Just FYI.

An Introduction to the Vengeance Team

To understand this blog, there are three people that you have to be introduced to: Meaghan Emery, Amy Atwater, and Mary Anning. Let’s start with the ones that aren’t dead, because they’re the most exciting.

Amy Atwater and Meaghan Emery have known each other since before anyone admitted that Amy was just never going to grow into her nose. At the time, Amy was a camper at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry’s Science Camps, while Meaghan was a counselor, sneaking off to get into trouble with Amy’s brother (who also sports the family beak).

Without the hair cuts, differentiating them is nearly impossible.

 

Meaghan later provided Amy with a snake she had raised from the egg, and their friendship fate has been sealed ever since that snake slithered into Amy’s possession (and promptly into her step-mother’s care, where it is now used to make house guests feel uncomfortable). Please note, both Amy and the snake’s bodies will be donated to science. Meaghan plans on never dying, so that’s a moot point.

Amy grew up a bit, while Meaghan came to terms with the fact that she never would and promptly began lying on all of her driver’s licenses. Today, they live together. They found each other once more at the University of Oregon where they learn about fossils and rocks. Meaghan is a first-year masters student while Amy is a senior doing original research on the cutest fossil mammals, Omomyids. Meaghan unfortunately has chosen the paleontological cow-patty minefield that is Oreodont taxonomy and diversity.  

Mary Anning, meanwhile, is still dead. Hopefully, if things go well, she’s fossilizing as we speak. In the early 1800’s Mary Anning found the first complete plesiosaur, the first British pterosaur, and she and her brother found the type specimen for ichthyosaurs. She was one of the most prolific paleontological collectors in history, and she spent most of her life on the beach scouring it for fossils to sell. She was an expert in the Jurassic Age marine sediments of England, and despite a lack of education or money produced many compelling pre-Darwinian ideas as to evolution, ecology and morphology of these organisms. The paleontologists of the day were wealthy, white men; she was well known amongst them for finding fossils and understanding their shape and function. Despite this, Mary wasn’t given credit for much of what she found or described. She was rarely published, and many of her ideas were stolen by the male paleontologists of the day. It wasn’t until long after her death that most of her many contributions to paleontology were recognized.  

Things are getting better, but they aren’t yet fair: out of the 19 professors on staff in the Geology Department at U of O, only 5 are female, and only 1 of them is a full-time Geology faculty member. Country-wide, women still make less than men in the same jobs, performing the same tasks. Sometimes it’s easy to forget this, or to sweep women into binders without much thought. Our culture doesn’t help - women are told throughout school that they’re not as good at math, not as good at science; they are told that their voices and opinions aren't as important. Whether these messages are overt or subtle, the sad fact is that it's 2012 and they still exist.

Fortunately ladies, Meaghan and Amy are here. We're intelligent, charismatic and unsurprisingly pretty good at math. More importantly, we’re very, very noisy. Ask any of our professors: we’ve got a lot of things to say (and nobody comes to your office hours anyway so that's not an excuse for cutting our post-lecture discussion off before we're finished, ugh!). In a time when male politicians are vomiting their stupidity all over the news, Amy and Meaghan are stepping forward to cough out opinions of their own (obnoxious, amazing, and otherwise).

We are female, we are scientists, and we refuse to be ignored.  We are Mary Anning’s Revenge.