Meig Dickson (ey/em)

Vaguely reminds me of Nahmavis, but emphasis is on vague

Not that I'm aware, which is unfortunate for my research

This is the first I’m seeing of Mr. Trashwheel, consider me smitten.

A scene set in an Eocene rainforest, circa 50 million years ago, in modern Wyoming. A Gastornis, with a gray plumage and an orange beak and blue eyes, is delighted to spot a Cyrilavis resting on their large beak. The Cyrilavis is white and gray with gray cockatiel-style cheek-spots

Gastornis/Diatryma meets one of their non-flightless neighbours, the stem-parrot Cyrilavis

Originally made as gift art for @kulindadromeus.bsky.social

Stella riding a skateboard with a gold Olympic medal #p4a2026 #animalwonders

Cover illustration for the board game Birdwatcher. A pair of Blue Birds-of-Paradise are here courting among tropical foliage. The male hangs upside down above the female, flaring out his breast and flank feathers and waving two long ribbon-like tail plumes while she assesses his display.

Looking for new and creative ways to impress your valentine? Try hanging upside down by your toenails and making yourself look extra-wide!

🎨🪶 #SciArt #BirdArt

Illustration of a Utahraptor, a large bulky dromaeosaur with a chunky head, deep belly, thick hindlegs and long tail. It is covered in a coat of coarse feathers, including pinnate wings on the arms. It has a dark crown, white supercilium, red irises, dark auriculars, and a cream "mane" of longer neck hackles, then a dark back and tail. It is posed as if looking to the side and down slightly while walking at a 3/4 angle toward the viewer, one foot raised.

Utahraptor for today's #DrawDinosDaily. These guys feel so much like the Cretaceous equivalent of a lion to me - big, powerful, and fast.

🎨 #SciArt #PaleoArt #dinosaurs

The cultural evolution of pluralistic ignorance | PNAS Pluralistic ignorance—the systematic misperception of others’ attitudes—can entrench suboptimal norms, yet its dynamics remain poorly understood. W...

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

a snowy plover being chased out of their little beach hole by another plover

It's Thursday, feels like a Monday, but it's always a Ploverday. #birds

A black ballpoint sketch of a female Great Currasow, viewed from the side, facing to the left of the image

Great Currasow (female) sketch

-3323 🎨🐡🪶 #art

Pair of illustrations depicting Archaeocursor, a small dinosaur only a few feet long. It has a small head, long body, very long tail, little grasping hands folded low near its belly, and big strong long legs for running. It is shown here with speculative mottled rich brown coloration, a white iris, and yellow folded skin wattles on the cheek.

Archaeocursor asiaticus for #DrawDinosDaily here taking a sit-down from all the running. I added the little head portrait after I decided I wanted to get deeper into speculative head wattles for this guy. Ornamentation like that is common in modern cursorial birds.

🎨🪶 #SciArt #PaleoArt

Side note, the Latin America #wingspan expansion is literally amazing. The new Hummingbird mechanic is so much fun, and so many great new birds were added. 20/10 would recommend.

So beautiful!!!

Digital portrait sketch of a male Resplendent Quetzal. He has a bright yellow beak, big black eye, and then a big fluffy spiky green and turquoise crest and beard of feathers in all directions around his head. On the breast, the colors turn toward blue, with a small patch of red near the wrist of the wing.

Little 1-hr Resplendent Quetzal portrait sketch, off @kulindadromeus.bsky.social 's dinosaur prompt list #DrawDinosDaily (link to list in reply)

Phew yay I will finally have time to do some of these!

🎨🪶 #BirdArt #SciArt

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.

To make it look like they’re trying lmao

Yeeeeeep we were startled ngl

I know of one report that lead to something (a report a group of us filed resulted in a 1 year conference ban), but the fact that the only example I can come up with is something so... underwhelming...

remember that time I got sanctioned for making a dumb tiktok joke about the types of vert paleos? good times

I once again am asking how one is supposed to finish a dissertation during *gestures at the world* and an adderall shortage on top of that

the svp Diversity Committee was not consulted on that press release
the svp Ethics Committee was not consulted on that press release
one has to wonder
who wrote the damn thing
and thought it was a good idea

This debate or discourse or discussion about why Bezos is dismantling WaPo or whether or not more subscriptions or boycotts could change things or how he could fund it easily is pointless. It’s moot.

Bezos bought the Post to control the narrative and push his agenda. Financials don’t matter.

Conclusions: 1. Horner and Epstein had repeated direct and indirect contact throughout 2012. Horner initiated contact again in 2016. Unclear which man first initiated contact and the extent to their communication not revealed in current DOJ releases. Reminder: Epstein was first convicted of attempting to hire a minor for sex in 2008. 2. Horner visited Epstein's Zorro Ranch in New Mexico on the weekend of August 3rd, 2012, to fossil hunt alongside Epstein and Danny Hillis. We have his exact flight numbers and departure/landing times. This was originally set for late July, but Epstein's scheduling issues with Woody Allen bumped the Ranch event by several days. 3. Afterwards, Horner solicited Epstein for funds to host a Dinochicken project conference at MSU from October 24-25 of that year. It is confirmed that Epstein cut a check to make this happen. 4. Afterwards, Horner sends a thank you message to Epstein and offers to add him to a dropbox of conference videos and photos, but mentions that this will make Epstein's name and email publicly visible, and asks Epstein if he has another email that is "less conspicuous". 5. In his correspondence with Epstein, Horner repeatedly mentions "the girls" to whom he offers best wishes, and calls Epstein someone "whom I envy". 6. Horner attempted to return to Zorro Ranch with a student in September of 2016, and it is unclear whether this took place. No emails more recent than 9/2016 mentioning Horner are publicly available from the DOJ. 7. An exchange between Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell in August of 2012 confirms that the two of them, alongside Bobby Kennedy, went looking for fossils with Horner during a previous, separate trip to North Dakota.

You can read my breakdown of the Horner - Epstein contact timeline starting with this comment: www.reddit.com/r/Paleontolo...

You can read a shorter summary of my conclusions here: www.reddit.com/r/Paleontolo...

Screenshot of the short summary below.

From the Paleontology community on Reddit: Timeline of Jack Horner - Jeffrey Epstein contact per DOJ's newest releases (see comments) Explore this post and more from the Paleontology community

3 hours ago, I shared my results of having combed through ~470 DOJ Epstein files that mention Jack Horner, his MSU email, or "Dinochicken". I posted a copy, w/ screenshots and receipts, to r/Paleontology. It has been pinned by moderators and thus far viewed 38k times.

www.reddit.com/r/Paleontolo...

🧵CC: @renpoole.bsky.social @paleojim.bsky.social @paleowin.bsky.social @nataliajagielska.bsky.social @skyemcdavid.com @kulindadromeus.bsky.social @stevebrusatte.bsky.social @shaena.bsky.social @arminreindl.bsky.social @raptorchatter.bsky.social @paleorob.bsky.social @cambriancam.bsky.social

look I'd make a new paleo society with blackjack (accountability) and hookers (transparency) but I'm trying to finish my damn dissertation ok

(PS): I would ask SVP: if associating with a known predator is not an issue of integrity... what the heck is then?

(11) Maybe it is time for SVP and its Annual Meeting to go the way of the creatures we study: Extinct. You either adapt or die and right now @societyofvertpaleo.bsky.social is not changing for the better. [End]

(10) I would also encourage friends and followers to consider their own ethics: Does being a member of @societyofvertpaleo.bsky.social align with *your* values? Do you condone this spineless protection? Sometimes the rot may be too great and it is time to cut the tree down and start over...