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dimetrodude.bsky.social
Caroline Abbott
@dimetrodude.bsky.social
1.4K followers 410 following 31 posts
Permo-Triassic #paleontology bog witch🦴🌿 | Artist + powerlifter when not doing PhD | Studying therapsid ontogeny and body size @UChicago @FieldMuseum | she/her #BiInSci 💜🩷💙
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Reposted by Caroline Abbott
davidmalakoff.bsky.social
Another scoop from Jeff Mervis (@policyhound.bsky.social): NSF's ~1400 grant terminations have disproportionately affected PIs from groups underrepresented in science: women, racial & ethnic minorities, & those with disabilities. 1/3
www.science.org/content/arti...
Trump officials take steps toward a radically different NSF
Efforts to shrink staff, budget, and focus have alarmed members of Congress
www.science.org
May 13, 2025 at 8:52 PM
Reposted by Caroline Abbott
luckytran.com
Brilliant protest. Yosemite National Park workers hung an upside-down American flag — traditionally a symbol of distress or a national threat — thousands of feet off the ground on the side of El Capitan.
An upside-down American flag hangs from El Capitan near Yosemite National Park’s Horsetail Fall on Saturday to protest the thousands of federal job cuts made by President Donald Trump’s administration. Tracy Barbutes/Special to the Chronicle
February 23, 2025 at 5:57 AM
Reposted by Caroline Abbott
murray.senate.gov
Gregg is a former Marine and Forest Service ranger. He's saved the lives of hikers dangling off a cliff or going through cardiac arrest, and he's bravely fought forest fires to save small rural towns.

100% of his salary is paid by WA state.

Elon fired him. Share his story.
February 23, 2025 at 6:35 PM
Reposted by Caroline Abbott
carlbergstrom.com
When OMB head Russ Vought talks about deliberate efforts to put federal employees "in trauma" and make them quit their jobs, he's talking about people like Michelle, recently fired by Musk/Trump.

www.sfgate.com/california/a...
Michelle Beutler cleared 67 trees off a U.S. Forest Service road in two days. It was the spring of 2023, after a record-breaking winter in the Stanislaus National Forest in California’s Sierra Nevada. Beutler, 59, worked alone with a chain saw to remove every fallen tree on a 10-mile stretch of road between the town of Long Barn in Tuolumne County and the popular Hull Creek Campground. She single-handedly finished the work so the road could open in time for Memorial Day. As a recreation technician based out of the Summit Ranger Station in the Stanislaus National Forest, Beutler’s job was to clean toilets, pick up trash and maintain recreation sites and campgrounds up and down Sonora Pass. She’d typically drive her Forest Service truck 100 miles a day. She sprayed pit toilets with a fire hose. She wiped away graffiti and removed thousands of pounds of house trash, old furniture and useless stuff that people dumped in the forest. She extinguished hundreds of abandoned and illegal campfires. She assisted law enforcement during emergency accidents, helping officers navigate a swath of rugged forest land that she grew up on and knows intimately.
February 24, 2025 at 12:04 AM
Reposted by Caroline Abbott
jurassicparkpod.bsky.social
It’s been a wild week for Jurassic fans, but one of the highlights for me was this awesome episode of the podcast featuring @dimetrodude.bsky.social and @conorontology.bsky.social discussing real science!
It’s a MUST listen!

www.jurassicparkpodcast.com/home/synapsi...
Synapsids | DINO DNA with Conor O'Keeffe and Caroline Abbott | Dimetrodon and Lystrosaurus — The Jurassic Park Podcast
Synapsids | DINO DNA with Conor O'Keeffe and Caroline Abbott | Dimetrodon and Lystrosaurus
www.jurassicparkpodcast.com
February 6, 2025 at 9:55 PM
Reposted by Caroline Abbott
sophiavolzke.bsky.social
I did capture a SMILING echidna in 2020. Perfect snap of the moment! Might be useful at this trying time :)
An echidna on brown mulch ground looking up at the camera and smiling.
February 4, 2025 at 1:21 PM
dimetrodude.bsky.social
Thanks so much for having me! It was so fun to chat about Dimetrodon and Lystrosaurus with you Conor, and representations of synapsids in paleo-media! I say let's get even MORE funky non-dino friends in the JW franchise!

#paleontology 🦖🪨🧪
February 5, 2025 at 3:10 PM
Reposted by Caroline Abbott
srferrar.bsky.social
Just wanted to make sure that everyone saw that the NSF RUI solicitation is BACK UP. Program staff indicated that it was accidentally archived.

new.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...
Facilitating Research at Predominantly Undergraduate Institutions: (RUI and ROA-PUI)
new.nsf.gov
January 31, 2025 at 3:26 PM
Reposted by Caroline Abbott
caxela.bsky.social
Moas!
A pair of bush moas (Anomalopteryx didiformis) walk through a dense forest. Ferns and moss cover the ground. A crested moa (Pachyornis australis) walks through a field of golden grass. Snow-capped mountains stretch across the most distant part of the background. A coastal moa (Euryapteryx curtus) crests a dune. A line of pīngao runs down the middle and across the top of the dune. A full moon glows above the moa. An eastern moa (Emeus crassus) walks along a shore at night. The pink lights of aurora australis can be seen above the horizon.
October 22, 2024 at 3:20 PM
Reposted by Caroline Abbott
tylermcbrien.com
Here's what Desmond Tutu had to say about DEI and aviation (probably), almost 40 years ago in the Washington Post
www.washingtonpost.com/archive/life...
Excerpt of Washington Post article that says: After he was ordained and had been a priest two years, Tutu was sent to London to study. "I'm sure there was racism there, but we were protected by the church. It was marvelous. We didn't have to carry our passes anymore and we did not have to look around to see if we could use that bath or that exit. It was a tremendously liberating thing." When Tutu returned to South Africa, he began to rise in the church hierarchy. Still, the strictures of his past sometimes haunted him. He recalls boarding a flight in Nigeria in the 1970s and discovering that the pilot and copilot were black. "I was thrilled," recalls Tutu. Black pilots! But once airborne, Tutu began shifting uneasily in his seat. He wasn't quite certain why. "I had a nagging worry about whether we were going to make it," he says. As he squirmed and worried, the cause finally hit him. It was the pilots. "Could these blacks really fly this plane . . . without a white person at the controls?" The real horror of apartheid, he explains, is that "it can cause a child of God to doubt that he or she is a child of God . . . You come to believe what others have determined about you, filling you with self-disgust, self-contempt and self-hatred, accepting a negative self-image."
January 30, 2025 at 10:10 PM
Reposted by Caroline Abbott
carlzimmer.com
National Science Foundation suspends salary payments, leaving researchers unable to pay their bills www.statnews.com/2025/01/30/t...
Story by @ericboodman.bsky.social
National Science Foundation suspends salary payments, leaving researchers unable to pay their bills
An NSF online payment system remained down after the federal funding freeze was lifted, leaving early-career scientists scrambling to pay bills
www.statnews.com
January 30, 2025 at 10:53 PM
Reposted by Caroline Abbott
bedform.org
Scientific societies don’t have to renew their commitments to work in a “bipartisan fashion” right now when one party is actively and extremely rapidly dismantling scientific enterprise in this country.
January 30, 2025 at 11:38 PM
Reposted by Caroline Abbott
notthatmarsh.bsky.social
This question means something else to a stratigrapher
January 31, 2025 at 1:36 AM
Reposted by Caroline Abbott
skwinnicki.bsky.social
Here is a photo of a trans non-binary biologist (me) holding a bird (Eastern Towhee) that is likely a bilateral gynandromorph-- a fusion of cells with female-type chromosomes and cells with male-type chromosomes in one bird!

Biological sex and human gender diversity is real and wonderful ❤️🏳️‍⚧️
Photo of SK in a forest in Pennsylvania, wearing a tie dyed field shirt from the 2017 grassland bird Konza Crew and holding a large sparrow that is black on one side of the body and brown on the other.
January 22, 2025 at 8:55 PM
Reposted by Caroline Abbott
egmitchell.bsky.social
Super excited that our review on the ecology of the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition is now out on how ecology changes across scales from organisms to communities to the world through time. Fab art @franzanth.bsky.social showing the build up of ecological complexity
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
January 22, 2025 at 6:28 PM
Reposted by Caroline Abbott
anatrecord.bsky.social
Trucidocynodon riograndensis, a Late Triassic carnivorous cynodont from Brazil, had spear-like incisors, elongated canines, and advanced brain structures. New CT scans reveal that canine replacement stopped and the species had unique jaw traits.
Kerber et al.: https://buff.ly/40EameI
#FossilFriday
January 17, 2025 at 3:00 PM
dimetrodude.bsky.social
I already have the Dimetrodon, Gorgonops, Wiwaxia, and Tiktaalik and was wondering what I should add to the collection and then I see...?! Trilobite?! Slippers?!?!? for $27 US DOLLARS?!!??!

Ugh twist my arm *adds to cart*
A pair of crazy slick olive green trilobite slippers, specifically the genus Greenops. They look comfy.
January 15, 2025 at 3:22 AM
dimetrodude.bsky.social
Me but in Evolving Planet at the Field Museum!!!

(but also at the aquarium because how can you not be in awe of every critter)
oceanfilly.bsky.social Brooke Fitzwater, PhD (she/her) 🐟🪱🏳️‍🌈♾️ @oceanfilly.bsky.social · Jan 15
Marine biologists every time they go to the aquarium
January 15, 2025 at 3:16 AM
Reposted by Caroline Abbott
aplante.com
ok it's been a rough start to the month here's a pink sky to cheer up the feed a bit #art
a foggy winter morning. the sky is purple and pink with a couple glowing clouds. the twilight hour casts a dusty lilac light over a dusting of snow across a field behind a small farmers' fence. a few semi-bare trees and bushes fade into the background.
January 13, 2025 at 9:08 PM
Reposted by Caroline Abbott
semifossorial.bsky.social
Our anatomical description of Hapsidopareion is out in Papers in Palaeontology! Thanks to collaborators and mentors @gondwannabe.bsky.social, Arjan Mann, and @hanssues.bsky.social and ISU undergraduate coauthors for their massive help with segmentation! 😄https://doi.org/10.1002/spp2.1610
January 7, 2025 at 4:56 PM
Reposted by Caroline Abbott
nataliajagielska.bsky.social
This building is standing on the shoulders of pterosaurs
December 12, 2024 at 3:18 PM
Reposted by Caroline Abbott
serpenillus.bsky.social
Quick sketch I did as a request from patron Flouder who suggested I sketched the Late Jurassic mammaliform Castorocauda lutrasimilis

#paleoart #sciart #sketch
A pair of Castorocauda on a partly submerged tree branch. One of the Mammaliforms has its head underwater looking at an aquatic salamander. A Pterosaur flies in the background
December 12, 2024 at 7:57 PM
Reposted by Caroline Abbott
witmerlab.bsky.social
Can I just say that this is about the coolest study that I've seen in ages. Just outstanding integrative science! #OA in Nature, too. Plus, the YouTube vid is exceptionally well done: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuvU.... Sorry if I'm gushing, but it's all an early #Crocmas gift. 🐊🎄
Self-organized patterning of crocodile head scales by compressive folding - Nature
Crocodile head scales self-organize through purely mechanical compressive skin folding rather than a patterning process controlled by gene interactions.
doi.org
December 12, 2024 at 5:06 PM
dimetrodude.bsky.social
Hi everyone! Back on this site after literally a year! Quick re-intro: I'm Caroline, a synapsid paleobiology PhD student finishing up at UChicago and the Field Museum. Interested broadly in paleoevodevo and quantifying variation 🦖👩‍🔬🐁🦴 I'm on that postdoc/faculty job grind 👀 Happy to be here!
December 11, 2024 at 5:21 PM
dimetrodude.bsky.social
@pattonoswalt.bsky.social loved your 10pm set tonight in Chicago!!! I (sadly) cheered for BRHS.... I am a grad of there (Mr. Richards fucking rules) and W&M. Your work was so important for me + my partner through tough times. This was our first time seeing you live and it was so special. Thank you!
November 9, 2023 at 5:59 AM