Brenen Wynd PhD

I just want other people to be as excited about esoteric discoveries as I get. Let us broaden our excitement from the usual 15 people to maybe 25 or 50 people lol

If you need someone with a comically large cane to pull you off stage, I'd be interested in applying.

I make it a point to teach the fact that we don't have neanderthal mitochondrial DNA. It's only nuclear. This means reproduction was mostly unidirectional, which is generally expected as populations are becoming more and more reproductively isolated. Signs of diverging species embedded in our DNA!

I just discussed with my students why essentialist and categorical discussions of traits are inherently wrong and that looking at these things from the POV of distributions is more accurate (and that binary divisions often eliminate natural individuals on the tails of their distributions)

That horrific state of the union starts to make sense if you consider that Trump doesn't believe that poor people are actually people. His policies are helping the people he cares about. A small percentage of the most fortunate individuals are thriving at the cost of almost everybody else. Impeach.

Very well deserved! It was an honor to get to write in support of all that you do.

Deeply saddened by the loss of Paleontologist and cat enthusiast, Hans-Dieter Sues. Hans work had a lot of influence on the science that I do, and his kindness had an immense impact on the kind of scientist I am. My heart goes out to his family.

So if companies are getting reimbursed for the tariffs, but we the people (who actually paid those tariffs) don't see a cent, do we get to skip taxes this year? Or can we have that extra money put into public programs that aren't a masked gestapo? Corporations aren't people, what are we doing?

It's almost as if historical decisions have some reasoning behind them and we should evaluate if those reasonings still apply to the systems that persist today.

I think I largely view PCA as an easy fix to a hard problem. There are those that do it well and incorporate as much info as possible into how they present those data. But others dive through axes to find the plot that best fits the story they want to tell.

I think that's fair, but when there are hundreds or thousands of axes, and those axes layer on interpretative aspects of trying to assign why species are clustered the way they are desimplifies the whole process. Even though the analysis itself is simple.

We really need to step away from black-box analyses that force us to discard most of the axes of variation. Just do a linear regression. It's robust, easily interpretable, and predictive in nature. I don't know why folks are averse to simple methods.

It is really is this simple. (Stares at multiple scientific societies.)

There used to be some pretty outspokenly transphobic individuals who did the art for some well known cards (Therese Nielsen) and Wizards stopped working with them and many of us put in extra work to make sure our collections weren't including their art in it.

Any Paleo preparators with experience using glass beads and butvar as a filler material for large broken bones?

Gene hunt also has a great stickleback paper

I've seen microbubbles as an option that I can order, but I currently have access to glass beads and it seems to me like beads would be more appropriate given the overall size and weight of the specimen.

Question for the Paleo preparator crowd: have you used glass beads in conjunction with high wt/volume vinac solutions(70-80%)? I have a hadrosaur femur that is broken in the midshaft and replacing the eroded material seems like it won't be enough. I want to give it more structural integrity

I wonder if we can put forth a petition to have his Romer Simpson award revoked. We all privately knew he was a predator, but this is publicly unacceptable and can maybe spur some change.

Completely unsurprised at Jack Horner in the Epstein files. He's been a known predator for a long time and my first (and only) interaction with him was him making a sex joke. Maybe SVP needs to consider taking away his Romer-Simpson award. It does not send a good message to young scientists.

Broken hadrosaur femur next to associated jacket. Specimen broke under its own weight and this jacket is the first step of restoration is building a clamshell.

On this #FossilFriday, I've finished the second attempt at a jacket on the way to restoring this broken hadrosaur femur. The specimen cracked under its own weight and once it finishes curing, I'll work on the rest of the clamshell to start restoration!

This jacket was done by separately jacketing both broken pieces and then joining the jackets together. Space is tight, but I'm making due!

Absolutely gorgeous specimen! Congrats!!

Congratulations! They will be so lucky to have you!!! Go forth and spread your strange fishomancy!

I'm thinking about getting a tattoo of the grain size chart. Should I just be responsible and keep it in my wallet, or should I make sure it's physically impossible to lose my grain size chart? (already planning scale bar on the finger, don't you worry about that)

Don't apologize, just show up with a pillow and sleeping bag and let them know you'll be sleeping with the [fossil] fishes during your stay

@hankgreen.bsky.social am I correct that there is not a sci show episode on Hox genes? If so, I'm simply baffled that you haven't talked about how ridiculous (and cool!) it is that we made fruit flies with legs instead of antennae, with two thoraxes, or the double butt flies.

The industrial revolution was not intentionally burning coal to warm the planet, they did it for efficiency sake. However, oil and gas has known their product contributed to climate change for over 60 years and put forth active disinformation campaigns. Don't let them off the hook.

I appreciate the shout-out! My addition would simply be, identify your biggest headaches and struggles that you experienced and educate the incoming graduate students on them. If they know what others have had issues with, they may know who to talk to or how to get through them. Great thread!

Same, girl. Big same.