GSA 2013: The Good, The Bad, and The Coyote Ugly

GSA was full of its fair share of tummy aches, talks where squinting was the only option, and hilarious, fabulous geology. First off, I finally physically met my mentor, Kate Zeigler!

Amy, Kate, and their Paleozoic pal eurypterid!

Our meeting in person was almost more than the geology gods could handle, but we fortunately weren't struck down and made into fulgurites (heh) as we dined on burgers and milkshakes. I could finally ask some questions that are hard to phrase over email ("Erm soo paleomagnitude... that's like, yeah, basalt points north? Poles switch and it blows my mind?") I also got a chance to grill her on some hard hitting paleo-questions which will be featured in an upcoming Vengeance Team interview (Meaghan guest stars and wow, what a guest she makes...).

I hadn't realized how much I had in common with Kate, who has been my mentor through the Huffington Post Girls in STEM program from afar for a few months. We have plans to rock climb in New Mexico whenever my skin becomes so pale that the SW sun is the only cure to my vitD deficiency.

SVP Summary Part 1: Dinosaurs are Surprisingly Relevant

We know, we know, there was no blog post last week. We're sorry. We were doing a science. We'll make up for it by posting too much this week instead!

Amy is still trying to pull together her thoughts from GSA (the beer there was free), but Meaghan has decided that instead of creating a cohesive summary she's going to vomit some grey matter on the page and let all y'all just deal with it. Today we're going to talk about Meaghan's favorite non-poster presentation which was, surprisingly, a dinosaur talk!

Infiltrating the Old Boy's Club

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the Old Boy's Club (OBC) is comprised of the old (and typically white) men who dominate the top tiers of many industries. This phenomenon is pretty apparent in most fields, but especially so in academia where female presence at high levels caps out at 35% at most. 

Now, we could shout about that endlessly in bitter, bitchy terms, but we’ve taken a dose of the considerate pills today (V.T. South’s roomie made pumpkin cake, V.T. North has a job again, all is awesome in the world) and decided to give the benefit of the doubt to members of the OBC: maybe they just don’t know about ladies’ struggles! Also, they probably don’t know about all the awesome ladies they could be hiring, because OBC members don’t network with ladies, they network with dudes.

Awesome Dead Shit: Macrauchenia

We were going to call this "Awesome Dead Thing of the Month,"  but let's be real: creating a "monthly" event is just going to end in disappointment for all. So here we are instead, scrounging for titles and trying not to commit to a temporally-set re-occurrence (DON'T BOX US IN), and the first one we're going to talk about is Macrauchenia.

You might be saying, WTF guys, way to not start out strong, what is this animal that looks vaguely like the word macaroni? Well, that's actually a pretty good comparison: this is an animal that had a body sort of like a llama (hence the "chenia" in the name, which is a reference to the old genus name for that group), with a face very much like a macaroni noodle. Observe:

Yeah, it sorta looks like Dumbo got teased one-too-many times about the size of his ears and went to visit Michael Jackson's all-natural-plastics doctor, or perhaps a llama got too invested in sniffing at a tube sock. But of course, as is ALWAYS THE CASE IN PALEONTOLOGY, Macrauchenia was related to neither of these.

The Shutdown: A Poem

On the 1st Amy woke without work
Because Congress is being a jerk

Deemed "nonessential"

By those influential

She must keep from going berserk.