#ask a paleontologist

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

hey so I wanted to become a paleontologist, and I was wondering how? Like the system that exists to educate a paleontologist seems to be such guesswork that it’s maddening. I just want to focus on vertebrate paleontology and it feels like the education system really doesn’t want that.

it doesn't profit capitalism (and in many ways actively destabilizes it as many things we learn from paleontology disprove founding theories of capitalism), so, yeah, the education system doesn't want that

you kind of have to claw for it

find someone to do research with, either at your institution or elsewhere

try to volunteer for relevant things (conferences, museums, etc)

think about what research questions you have and narrow down grad school choices to people who study the same questions. be as specific as you can

learn everything you can about everything you can because paleontology is holistic af

#paleontology #ask a paleontologist #ask a scientist #actual paleontologist #advice #how to be a paleontologist

[briarpatch-kids]

Cunk on Earth is worth watching just for watching her ask experts the most ridiculous inane questions she can and see them flabbergasted because they're used to answering serious questions.

#she asks a paleontologist if ancient humans had human flesh or if there was another brand for it #then she speculates with him what a good brand name for human flesh is

[mangosaurus]

sorry for the constant benrius posting i promise it'll end soon. not today though my brain spontaneously spawned an academic rivals-to-lovers paleontologists benrius AU and now it's all i can think about forever

#someone PLEASE ask me about the academic rivals-to-lovers paleontologists benrius AU. i NEED an excuse to inflict this upon the masses #mango roars

[cha-melodius]

nice ask day time for you, Sara! Tell me about your favourite dinosaur 🦕🦖

You’d think I’d have a better answer for this given how often it gets asked of me, but ultimately I have to go with Majungasaurus, which is a bizarre predatory dinosaur from Madagascar, for reasons that I can’t elaborate on without giving too much away about myself. 😅

He got some love in the new season of prehistoric planet, so have this silly reconstruction of one harassing a tiny crocodile.

#nice ask day #just paleontologist things #dinosaurs #asks and answers

[ask-emoripals]

What would you do with a million dollars?

🎹: Make a cat cafe business with Hero as my lovely husband who visits daily to drink coffee!

🔪: Find a way to pet tigers without dying.

⭐️: Save up on the money and when I have enough, fund treatment for my mom’s alcoholism and to support me and my dads house. :|

🪴: Get therapy for my weed addiction, and buy a new camera.

🏀: Move out of that fucked up house with my baby sis and Sunny.

📖: Support Sally and her future, as I am worried they’ll neglect her as they did Kel.

🦖: Find a way to revive dinosaurs or other prehistoric animals. Either that or find a way to destroy Jack Horner’s wealth! >:(

🖌️: Buy art supplies and not starve as an artist.

🦈: Make an actually USABLE submarine!

#emori ask blog #ask emori pals #emori au #emori #omori ask blog #omori suntan #omori mari #omori heromari #omori sunny #omori aubrey #omori basil #omori hero #omori kel #omori kim #omori mincy #omori cris #kim is talking about the irl #paleontologist jack horner #not the Puss and Boots one #cris hasn’t and will never forget Oceangate #omori #tw alcohol #tw alchoholism

[is-the-owl-video-cute]

is it possible to create an appropriate dodo enclosure or is there not enough info on their behavior/nutrition needs to make an educated guess?

Extinct birds are well out of my scope of knowledge I’m afraid.

#Ask a paleontologist or whoever studies extinct animals not in paleo period #I don’t even know what that’s called #I know archosaurs and parasites and some bacteria and protists that’s it #and I cannot stress enough even that is only the ones that are extant #extinct animals I just look at pictures of longingly kicking my feet #I have no knowledge on them #They’re just neat to look at

[corpsoir]

sure is old alright!!!!

also i am going to cry the next time i see a meme confusing archaeology and paleontology please they are different fields aauhuguahguhg

#yes there is overlap when it comes to studying really really old and extinct hominids #or when studying things like the oldowan and achulean cultures #yes archaeologists study rocks but its only rocks modified or used by human hands ALRIGHT ! #im normal im fine its ok its just a silly meme corp calm down #archaeology is human material culture and paleontology is extinct boring stuff <- is about to make the paleontologists so mad for that #ask

[barbielore]

Was there a Barbie that you discovered (at any period of time) that particularly was your favorite or exciting?

Basically every time I find out about a remarkable Barbie I didn’t know about it’s exciting, but for now I am going to talk briefly about paleontologist Barbie!

There’s actually been a few paleontologist Barbies but when I was a kid, I had this one from the Career Collection (released in ~1996, so dinosaurs and paleontology were very much in the mainstream, especially for kids).

She also came in brunette!

But actually this wasn’t the only paleontology themed Barbie!

This is also a paleontologist Barbie, but I’m not sure what year she is from. She looks more recent than 1996 but that’s about all I can confirm off hand.

Barbie just loved digging up dinosaur bones I guess!

#barbie #paleontologist barbie #barbie career collection #asks

[mera-mann-kehne-laga]

.

#Everyone #I repeat everyone #Was so sure of what they were gonna do and why they have opted for science #One wants to become a “paleontologist” #Another wants to become a doctor salunkhe (forensic investigator or something) #Another's aiming for a cardiologist #Someone a software developer #Someone an airforce officer for fighter jets #What was i supposed to say when 3 teachers asked me why and what I'm planning to do #I just lied about wanting to do software engineering :) #I wouldn't have been able to face their questions if i would've told them the truth #I was already so fuckn nervous #3 of my classmates and a teacher told me that i shouldn't have taken non medical #Arts would've been wayy better I'm just wasting my time here #I have no idea what is going on

[lexosaurus]

🍭 for your writers ask game?

Okay this one is cute.

Question: Why did you start writing?

Originally, I started writing as a kid because my parents started a company together and I was bored! They only had a few employees and a whole office space they rented, so they just shoved me and my sister in a conference room on weekends/summers if they didn't get a sitter that day. They gave us a few hours of computer time per day (aka Webkinz), but otherwise we had to find other ways to occupy ourselves, so I started writing! As a kid, I wrote little stories about spies and paleontologist adventurers on pieces of computer paper, and I stored them in a manila folder my dad gave me.

When I got old enough to stay home by myself during the day, I sorta stopped writing as much. But then in high school, I found fanfiction! And I was like, oh, this is freaking DOPE and I wanna do it! So then I did.

#ask #writing ask game #yes elementary school me wanted to be a paleontologist when i grew up what gave it away

[random2908]

Oh wow, a real physicist!! I’ve read a few of your posts on philosophy of science, and I think you’ve mentioned that you aren’t a religious person, but I’m curious if you have any thoughts on the compatibility of physics/science in general and religion?

Well, the tl;dr I guess is that it depends a lot on what specific religion you're talking about, and on how you approach religion.

"Religion" means a lot of different things to different people. I wouldn't say I'm not a religious person. I keep kosher; I keep the holidays; I try not to let my job spill over onto weekends (both for myself and for anyone I work with); I talk about religion a lot; I study every single day, and have done so my entire life--not always the Torah, although always something related to my understanding of religion (the universe and my place in it): science, social justice, but yes, also sometimes the Torah. To me, in the context of my religion, that is being religious. Certainly not extremely so, and I do have plenty of extended family who are much more religious to contrast myself with. Therefore whether I say I'm religious or not is usually contextual, based on what I'm comparing myself to.

Now, I want you to notice two things in my previous paragraph. The first is that I listed studying science as a religious practice for me. And I do consider it that. It's not the only reason I'm a scientist, but it's definitely related. Among Jews, this is a fairly common attitude--0.2% of the world's population are Jewish but ~25% of Nobel Laureates in the sciences are, and some of that is directly because there is a religious fervency among Jews when it comes to academic pursuit, including science.

But you can meet plenty of people from other religions who feel similarly, even if it's not the mainstream attitude in a lot of other religions like it is in Judaism. At my previous job, the other two PhD physicists were both Catholic, and both of them felt similarly, that being a scientist was a part of practicing their religion; the mainstream Catholic hegemony has actually encouraged this attitude on and off over the centuries (despite some very obvious historical cases where they were anti-science), and especially it was a pet issue of Pope John Paul II, who was the Pope for the whole childhood and early adulthood of my coworkers. There are certainly conservative Catholics, especially in the US, whose views are not in line with Papal pronouncements in this respect, but officially the Catholic church is pro-science (including pro-evolution), and is known for funding astronomy and medical sciences in particular. Meanwhile, in contrast, the engineer at my last job was baffled to hear all of this from the rest of us over lunch one day. He'd grown up Mainline Protestant (i.e. not Evangelical), which is not a hierarchical religion and so allows a lot of individual variation in opinion, but generally takes a neutral stance toward science. He felt as though science versus religion was a choice he'd made, and he'd chosen science and rejected religion. In contrast to his feelings on it, I've known other scientists from science-neutral religions who have not felt any need to make a choice, but rather that science and religion are simply unrelated and therefore cannot be in conflict; I've worked with Buddhists, Hindus, and yes Mainline Protestant Christians who all felt that way. And then there are yet other religions, Evangelical Protestant Christianity topping the list, where science and religion are in direct conflict and people from those religious backgrounds make an active choice of one or the other, or make an active choice to keep those parts of their life fully compartmentalized from each other.

The second thing I want you to notice is that so far I've said nothing about faith. I didn't even list it among my own religious practices--because it isn't there. I'm a Jew, it doesn't have to be. In fact, I'm a third-generation agnostic/atheist: not even any of my grandparents believed in G-d, although each lacked belief in a different way.

Taking a faith-based approach to the world does hinder scientific practice, in my opinion, and in the opinion of most of my scientist friends. A scientist needs to be willing to discard their most deeply held beliefs about how the world works when presented with evidence to the contrary.

For me, as a Jew, it's just a non-issue. My most deeply held religious beliefs are all about how to set up a moral and ethical framework, not about the way the world works; they're not based on faith in things that can be in conflict with evidence. (And since they're about the framework rather than the specifics, I have the flexibility to change my individual moral stance on an individual issue when I'm presented with evidence that a previous stance was based on ignorance.) So here, I'd agree with that subset of Mainline Protestants, as well as people from Eastern religions, who say there cannot be a conflict because my religious beliefs are simply unrelated to any of the questions science is trying to answer. (With the caveat that more knowledge helps put beliefs into more effective practice, and therefore science can help religion. Interestingly, while I as a Jew mean this with respect to beliefs about how to practice ethics, Catholicism takes this a step further to beliefs about religious cosmology, saying that things like the Big Bang Theory and evolution elucidate how God performed the acts of creation. The majority of Jews don't take religious cosmology literally enough for this to even come up as a question; among those who do, most parallel the Catholic approach of agreement and elucidation, and relatively few parallel the Evangelical Christian approach of anti-science.)

There are other people, from strongly faith-based religions, whose personal philosophies are all about faith. These religions are the ones where I think there's a major incompatibility between science and religion--when the incompatibility is in an approach to understanding the world rather than about the specific stories. People from these religions tend to have two options. They can either compartmentalize so strongly that they practice an entirely different way of understanding the world when doing science than in the rest of their life, which is cognitively pretty difficult. Or, they can choose between science and religion, rejecting one in favor of the other.

All of that said, there’s yet a third issue which is a bit of a pet peeve of mine when it comes to philosophy of science. And that’s when people who claim to be taking a scientific approach are actually taking a faith-based approach to science concepts. You see that when people talking about “believing in” evolution--sometimes they’re using that phrasing as short-hand, but sometimes they really mean it in a religious way. But you also see it a lot with people who confuse meta-science for science, or who confuse analogy for fact. That’s muddying the waters in a way that I find intellectually dangerous. It leads to misunderstanding the nature of science, and occasionally can even lead to cult-like thinking (Less Wrong springs to mind as the paradigmatic example, but I’ve also got a friend who is in a new-age-y “science”-based cult).

#science and religion #I'm showing my age a bit here but to my last two points there was an episode of Friends where Ross and Phoebe were arguing #about evolution back and forth for the whole episode #and the big gotcha at the end of the episode was that when Phoebe asked Ross (a paleontologist) if he'd stop believing in evolution #if presented with sufficient evidence #he said yes #and she took that to mean (and the writers seemed to think) that she was the intellectually stronger of the two #rather than that Ross was being a good scientist #anyway that really bugged me

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

What's the most disappointing thing you've had to unlearn about a dinosaur when new research came out?

honestly I've never really been disappointed in new research

I like getting closer to the truth. my desire is to honor the past by describing it accurately. getting closer to that goal is always a good moment.

that said, its sad that the evidence seems to be spinosaurus was a hell heron and not a hell loon. love hell heron, but hell loon would have been awesome

#dinosaurs #paleontology #ask a paleontologist

[strigops]

extremely funny to me that the place i work at puts a huge emphasis on dinosaurs in our educational stuff bc the general public loves dinos but none of the educational staff are like, dinosaur ppl. none of us have formally studied dinosaurs aside from what we’ve had to research for this particular job. all it takes is a six year old with a very specific question for us to stare at each other for a few seconds and then be like “well. i can look that up for you and get back to you!!” we are Forced to know them but the terrible lizards have no actual foothold here

#the NUMBER of times ive been introduced as a paleontologist and then had to tell someone ‘i do mammals. Do Not Ask Me abt dinosaurs’

[cha-melodius]

Hi :)

So, I somehow watched a few paleontologist reacts to dinosaur movies videos and it gave me an idea for a weird TMFU AU. What if Napoleon is a movie director who is planning to make a series of movies about dinosaurs (something like Jurassic Park) and Illya is a paleontologist who is called in as an expert consultant. Illya is of course very adamant that everything has to be as realistic as possible and Napoleon is more like "it's not a documentary, it doesn't have to be 100% true". Hence they argue all the time.

Your thoughts on this?

Hope you'll have a great day!!

It's been far too long since I got an AU idea in my inbox! Oh, for the days of blorbo au, or the fruit gang au, or tmfu/goncharov crossover, lmaoooo.

ANYWAY, thank you for sending this in. I am unsurprisingly familiar with the genre of video you are talking about (and before anyone asks, no, I've never made any of them... but it's really weird to see people I know from grad school making them now and being like OH THAT IDIOT (affectionate)). Illya as the thorn in Napoleon's creative side is an excellent idea all around, particularly something like this. Napoleon would want to be free to make the movie the way he wants, and Illya is utterly obsessed with all the details he's getting wrong. The thing is, Napoleon does want his movie to be reasonably accurate, he just is also of the opinion that there's a lot of room for interpretation (and he's not wrong), whereas Illya is of course very wedded to his own theories. I love the idea that Napoleon surprises him in one of their arguments by busting out some alternate interpretation of a fossil and Illya is just flummoxed (and also a little turned on) because he assumed Napoleon hadn't bothered reading up on it at all.

Of course Waverly is the producer, and I like Gaby as the special effects supervisor—and they're doing things a little old school, with lots of practical effects so she can build ALL the things. Illya learns he can sneak some stuff in just by going to her and getting her to build the models that way. 😂

I think over the course of making the movie they first come to an uneasy truce, but THEN they start spending more time together. Maybe Napoleon at first invites Illya to come have drinks one evening so they can discuss things to placate him even though he doesn't think Illya will actually take him up on it. But Illya reluctantly agrees, and they actually end up having a good conversation. They start spending nearly every evening of filming together, still arguing over almost everything but it's getting a lot flirty (especially on Napoleon's side lmao).

I'm not 100% sure where else this would go but I have a vision of Napoleon bringing Illya to the premiere as his date. Maybe there's some drama about it because Napoleon's mostly been an indie film director but landed this big-budget summer tentpole movie that has the potential to make him a big name. He's never really thought about how being out in Hollywood would affect him until this moment, when suddenly it seems to matter more than it did when he was off making weird indie flicks. But he really really wants Illya to be there with him and not just for the movie.

Thanks so much again for sending this in, it was so lovely to dust off the ol' AU plotting muscles and dream up something for these two. 💕

#napollya #tmfu #tmfu aus #the man from uncle #the man from u.n.c.l.e. #headcanons and aus #napoleon x illya #just paleontologist things #asks and answers

[peitalo]

oops hii im the anon with the brother named caelum i only just saw that you responded LOL, in answer to your question of "does he like dinosaurs?": yes. oh my god. that's literally his *thing*. our living room has a glass case full of dinosaur figurines. jurassic park poster on the wall. dont get me started on his bedroom. when i was in my first year of primary school the teachers pulled him out of his class to come teach us about dinosaurs. because he knew more than any of the teachers did. there are no such things as coincidences...

the world is such a beautiful tapestry of connection and coincidence. please get your brother this cake

#asks #anon #this is still so . …. cannot believe this. i apologize for the confusion i create with my paleontologist oc caelum

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

#uuuugh i desperately want to take a geology course #and aquire paleontology friends #and be a paleontologist. i mean i wanna be an astrobiologist with Microbiology. ecology. evolutionary biology. geology. and paleontology #influences. also biochemistry. and that's all vaid bc astrobiology is intersectional. i can get there however i want #and what i want is to look at the evolution of biochemistry in cyanobacteria but finding someone who does something that specific is hard #but like learning abt paleontology has broken my brain a bit. like maybe its just bc im in the desert and u can see the exposed ground but #like i look at the landscape and see the volcanic rock and uplifted areas snd everything and its just like #holy fuck we are walking around on 4billion years worth of history and i wanna kno how all those processes work #in terms of making the landscape how it is #and i got to see some fucking wild trace fossils the other day and i was so fucking excited to see them #and when i go home to visit i think we're gonna see a pretty good natural history museum #bc my parents were like: what do u wanna do while ur home? and i was like well u see i am v into paleontology atm #and im v excited to go with them bc idk they kno what kinda freak i am and that always makes things easier #also they would prob read the info on the exibits if i asked bc i cant fucking read lol #and my mum is v into rock collecting rn so that is an excuse for me to learn abt geology stuff #hhhhh there is just so much cool stuff to learn #and everyday i have to sit there and do my lab work on a topic that i have greatly diverged away from #like my boss was like: im so excited. when we publish all this data u will be the name ppl think of when they think of carbon cycling in X #system! which is true. its a narrow field and ive generated lots of data #and what do i feel abt all that data? absolutely fuck all. its like ive maliciously collected a bunch of little gems and then im gonna #uncarimonially dump them on the floor for a tiny collection of ppl and then walk the fuck out the door #idk its probably just me being passive aggressive bc collecting the data has/is casuing me such physical and mental strain #but god if i could take a paleontology class rn id be so fucking annoying abt it. to b fair id also be the same abt a Microbiology class #sigh... maybe within the next year #unrelated #lmao im extremely annoying abt paleontology now and i havent even taken a class #at every chance im just like: well u kno... *insert fact here* #and i feel so obnoxious but i can't stop so i guess its just a hazard of being around me haha