Through the few connections I still have with Wash U via Facebook, I discovered that Phyllis Schlafly is to be awarded an honorary degree at this year's Commencement. And it hasn't gone down too well, and I'm delighted to see that Feministing has picked up on it too. You'll be able to read the full objections - I don't plan to list them all (and my honest opinion, even though I'm a palaeontologist, is that her rampant IDiocy is really no reason to deny her an honorary degree, unless it is in a scientific subject - the rest, however, is fair game!).

But I can't say I'm surprised that a university that allows an alleged violent sexual predator (against whom there really were a lot of witnesses that the university didn't bother to interview) to remain in post in a position of responsibility and power over young female students, completely unchecked, and effectively endorse his attacks on (at least) two other women before finally deciding to fire his ass, would honour a woman who quite publicly stated:

Sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for virtuous women, except in the rarest of cases. Men hardly ever ask sexual favors of women from whom the certain answer is no. Virtuous women are seldom accosted.

Just goes to show that the whole university is rotten right the way up to the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees. How sad for this year's graduates to have to share the stage with such a vile human being.

My advice to the graduating class? Whatever you do with your life, do something that undermines what Phyllis Schlafly stands for, even if it's a very small thing. Show by your actions that the students can rise above the decay within the administration. And rather than pay your respects at the next alumni fundraising drive, donate what you would have given to the university to a charity that will uphold the human rights Ms Schlafly clearly doesn't believe in. The legacy you leave will be priceless.

Paul sent me a link to this BBC News article:

Landslip is "Worst In 100 Years"

How tragic. I know these things happen - the cliffs around there aren't overly stable, and we were certainly told not to climb the ones around Charmouth. I remember visiting ten years ago and being able to gouge the rock with my fingers. Fortunately no one seems to have been hurt, and as long as no one tries to get into the area befor it's been stabilised this will continue.

But what of the fossils? Undoubtedly there'll be some totally destroyed by the landslip, and nothing can be done about them. They'll no doubt be picked up by keen amateurs when the beach is reopened. However, I do hope museum teams are allowed to survey the area once it's made safe, just in case anything of significance is exposed...

Of course, the area is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). Just in case anyone was thinking of doing anything dangerous or silly or indeed illegal after reading that.

***

As an aside, I want to say thank you to everyone who responded to my earlier post about my PhD woes. I had a lot of long encouraging private e-mails, all of which deserve a similar reply, and it's going to take me a while to get back to everyone. But even if it takes me a while to get back online (you'll notice I've been having very little trouble banging out excited gardening posts but have been almost silent on here, Facebook and e-mail) I want you all to know how grateful I am.

I wish I was going to the Dinosaurs: A Historical Perspective conference. But that's one of the many ways that having a full-time job and a part-time PhD fucking sucks.

(I was hoping to be able to showcase my design for the Linnaeus' Legacy banner, but it still needs a little work and I should run it by Christopher first.)

There are few creatures so elusive in the forest that is the Interwebs as the blog carnival submission. So it's on with hiking boots, midge repellent and a good pair of binoculars for the wildlife walk.

Near the edge of the woods, it's easy to spot a few familiar species. Neil of Microecos is actually offering an easy mnemonic for taxonomic hierarchy when he says "Kindly please come over for gay sex", and not prospecting for mates. Christopher at Catalogue Of Organisms ponders the irritability of birds and its historical use in avian classification. Ever generous, he also offers his thoughts on the importance of type specimens in light of the imminent closure of the Utrecht Herbarium. Dave Hone donates from his archive to tell us about chimeras in palaeontology. And John at A DC Birding Blog reports on a legless lizard, a dwarf woodpecker and climate change.

Zach at When Pigs Fly Returns finishes off what has been an epic series on dragon taxonomy with a monster of a post on draconian systematics.

Pressing forward, into the tried and tested spots for finding wildlife, Jim at From Archaea to Zeaxanthol has some beautiful images of things that are not insects. Mike of A Three-Pound Monkey Brain reminds us that the third meeting of the ISPN is happening in July. I'm sure there are some readers who won't want to miss that. Hairy Museum of Natural History's curator Matt has news on the new pterosaur Raeticodactylus filisurensis.

A hidden gem, and a very welcome sighting for this edition is Michael's announcement on Palaeoblog that on 1 May 1753 Linnaeus' own book Species Plantarum was published. And Anne-Marie has a fascinating post on plantain taxonomy at Pondering Pikaia. The Darwin's Garden exhibit has opened today in New York, and Dispersal of Darwin has the low-down on this. Linnaeus would most definitely have approved.

Well off my well-trod path, I stumble upon Jura's discussion of rapid evolution in lizards over at The Reptipage. And the Te Papa blog has the full story on their colossal squid necropsy, and it's happening right now! As of the time of writing, they're getting ready to cut...

To end the foray into the dark forest of the nature blogosphere on a sad note, Darren talks about the decline of the British cat population. And that's as much cat blogging as you're getting here. But I'm delighted to see that we're celebrating British insects on a new set of postage stamps - a joint venture between Royal Mail and the Natural History Museum. And I couldn't finish without a little plug for my new blog, where I ponder gardeners' use of binomials.

Next month's Linnaeus' Legacy will be up on or around 5 June at When Pigs Fly Return. I shall hand over the binoculars to you Zach!

The next edition of Linnaeus' Legacy is going up here in 48 hours' time. If you haven't sent me your posts now would be a really good time to do so!

I thought I'd give the Scientiae Carnival a go for the first time, as I seem to be doing a lot of navel-gazing at the moment. It's been a struggle, but probably good for me.

Ten years ago I was 18, and by late April approaching my last day at school. I coasted through my A-levels on the basis that Maths, Chemistry and Physics were quite easy and my offer for Cambridge didn't worry about Biology (I got exactly the same grade on my resit of the "Transport, Regulation & Control" module as I did on the original, except that I didn't revise at all for the resit...). I was incredibly confident in my abilities. One of my closest high school friends used to call me Professor Heathcote, so sure were we all that I was destined for great things. I was totally ignorant of the realities of life in academia, but absolutely determined to be a palaeontologist. The tactful would have said I was headstrong and ambitious. Most would have said I was bloody-minded and full of myself.

Five years ago I was 23, and having met him a month before I started university, engaged to Paul. We were living in a studio flat in a grad student hall of residence, while I did my MRes. I already had my offer from Wash U, and by this time in 2003 was probably wangling another stint in the palaeontology dept, even though I should have been farmed out to the Silwood Park campus for my final project. I was by now quite adept at saying "I have a PhD offer that is not contingent on me finishing the MRes, I am one of only two people on the course and I'm sure you don't want a 50% drop-out rate, so you'd better let me do what I want". I think I had to play that card three times - once to be allowed to tutor one afternoon a week (earning the same money as the students working in bars and call centres several nights a week), once to be allowed to stay in central London, and once to be allowed to have my viva the day before I left for the US.

I was still incredibly ambitious, and prepared to go wherever I needed to go to fulfil my desire to be a palaeontologist. However, I did still say to Paul "If you don't want me to go, say so and I won't go", and he was very brave and said I had to go because if I didn't, then I wouldn't be me. I enjoyed teaching and I enjoyed research, and much like ScienceWoman, I'd have been happy doing either. But within six months I found myself saying to Josh Smith "If tenure-track is going to make me as miserable as you clearly are, then I don't want to do that. I'll go for a museum position and get out of academia".

Now? I'll be honest. The year at Wash U almost broke me. Even a week before I went over there, I showed Paul around the dept and excitedly opened the doors on the Cetiosauriscus cabinet. Now I can barely bring myself to scan in the photos of the same that I promised Jeff about a month and a half ago. When I decided to try to do my PhD again part-time, I just wanted to get the PhD done. I intended to see what life held for me in six-seven years' time and see what the job market was like, what our finances were like, whether at 33 I'd be too old to do a post-doc. Now I have realised that the PhD topic I want to do will be impossible without the ability for me to take a month off work at a time to visit collections. I could use all my holiday, but then I can't go to any conferences, or have a holiday, or even wait in for the plumber. Or I could try to take unpaid leave. But then I would need to have the means of generating the same income AND paying for the trip. I can get funding for the data collection visits easily enough, but even if I ate bread and water, gave up the weekly trip to the pub with my workmates and didn't buy another plant, I could not pay my way in the rent and pay off my student debts.

Bottom line is, if anyone thinks the geometric morphometrics of sauropod dinosaur vertebrae is of utmost importance to the scientific community, then please give me £20,000. Then I can either swan off for a month every year to visit museums or jack in the current Real Job and retrain as a teacher so I have the summer holidays free for said swanning off. If anyone seriously has £20,000 burning a hole in their pockets (I'm looking at you, Simon Cowell), my contact details are here.

But in some ways it's been enlightening. I'm brainstorming (hate that word but it's a good shorthand) ideas, and wondering whether it is possible to get a PhD in palaeontology without leaving the library. When I have some ideas (and can be sure I won't burst into tears in front of my advisors - all men hate women crying, academic men even more so) there will be a meeting. PU is already aware that I'm having difficulties working my way around the situation. And it's ground my reading to a standstill - why bother reading anything more about morphometric techniques or sauropod specimens when it's not like I can actually go and take data from any of them? The garden is good - the garden is keeping me sane and grounded. My ability not to kill plants is reminding me that I am at least good at something, even if palaeontology (and, it would appear, managing my finances and having plenty of savings) is not in that category.

For the first time ever, I have had a positive response when asking myself the question "If I were on my death bed, and I had never made palaeontology my career, would I be okay with that?". I'd be bloody pissed off if I was still doing what I'm doing at the moment as part of the Real Job though. So really in the last year (but probably caused by events nearly five years ago) I think I've lost that ambition, the passion, the desire. Both my parents, not to mention my husband, would say I'm still bloody-minded. I'd like to get the PhD, not least because (with apologies to Lady Bracknell) to quit one PhD may be regarded as a misfortune. To quit two looks like carelessness. A lot of people are rooting for me.

It was events within the science that destroyed the passion - I'm sure if I still felt that ambitious I'd find a way around the job-PhD problem. I'd probably declare myself bankrupt for one thing, give up the one-bedroom flat for a studio, or a double room in a shared house. I'd make Paul suffer with me. Or I'd have stuck it out in the US, accepted the Dean's offer for me to do my PhD in the Biology or Anthropology depts, and I might be close to defending by now. But I wouldn't be married, and that's just not something worth passing up. The Real World is just added complications.

But it's the Real World - my husband and the plantbabies (Matildus, Karma, Sideshow Bob, José Cuervo, Bastard and all the rest of them), my family, my friends and the little village in the middle of West London that we call home - that also makes everything better.

Today's Sun:

Tyrannosaurus Pecks: King of dinosaurs became the chicken

Complete with horrendous "March of Progress"-esque PhotoShop transformation between Tyrannosaurus rex and a domestic chicken, although even before you get into the whole Tyrannosaurus-didn't-actually-morph-into-a-chicken thing it looks bad - "evolution" is supposed to be left-to-right but the animals are facing the wrong way.

Don't read the comments though. Unless you've been told by your doctor that your blood pressure is dangerously low and that your only hope is exposing yourself to the lobotomised.

The Science website has the abstract up now, so I'll include the citation. Full text access only to subscribers though (of which I am not one, grrr). I know the battles have raged about whether journal articles should be freely available or not. But surely it could only be a good thing if the journals made available the PDF of whatever paper they're really pushing? Even just on the day of the press release, so that the journalists and bloggers could get a look at the primary source? Some journals seem to do that and then restrict access a week after the article has come out. It couldn't do any harm, and it might actually improve scientific literacy.

Organ, C.L., M.H. Schweitzer, W. Zheng, L.M. Freimark, L.C. Cantley & J.M. Asara. 2008. Molecular Phylogenetics of Mastodon and Tyrannosaurus rex. Science 320 p499. doi: 10.1126/science.1154284.

Just in on the Dinosaur Mailing List (courtesy of Tom Holtz): T. rex confirmed as great granddaddy of all birds. So what can be gleaned from the article (as of writing the reference is not on the Science website yet, but the DOI is 10.1126/science.1154284 if you feel like periodically checking) is that the authors built a molecular phylogeny using collagen. And I presume they did so because they found some in a Tyrannosaurus rex bone.

At best, it confirms what we already knew (I particularly like the comments from Mark Norell and Tom Holtz) - Tyrannosaurus rex is related to modern birds. I'm sure a lot of palaeontologists would like to tell Alan Feduccia where to stick it, but until we all see the tree we just don't know where exactly "Granddaddy" is placed relative to Aves. The technique has also thrown up at least one glaring error, concluding that anolid lizards are more closely related to mammals than to alligators.

Maybe we'll get a discussion going on this when the paper is out (I'd settle for an abstract!!), but I can't help but think that it's nice and all, but it's a bit like leaning a stick against a brick wall and claiming that now the wall won't fall down. Still, I predict the newspapers tomorrow will have headlines referring to "Tweetiesaurus", or enormous chicken drumsticks. Tabloids aren't very imaginative. They'll probably make some pithy comment about how we wouldn't have the problems with increased poultry prices if dinosaurs still existed too.

The sixth edition of Linnaeus' Legacy is now up at From Archaea to Zeaxanthol.

I'm going to be hosting the next one on 5 May. Please let me have your submissions by Saturday 3 May (as I'm being a dentist's muse all that weekend...), either by leaving a comment here or by using the many and varied methods in my contact page.

The Royal Institution are planning a Science Blogging Conference in London in August or September of this year. I really want to go, not least because I had to bail last week on Ed's invitation. I honestly was planning to go, but work and stuff... You know? It coincided with a work do, which was exhausting and a bit too generous on the champagne, and it would not have been a good plan for your Ethical Palaeontologist to roll in already tired and emotional.

I faithfully promise to at least start off this conference sober though. Unless it's on 30 August, in which case there's no way I can even attend. My presence is required elsewhere.

Thanks to Propter Doc for mentioning this. Hope there'll be loads more UK science bloggers there too.

Although it's been quiet in the blogosphere (did like Janet's post though), Aetogate continues to be the subject of much discussion on the Vert Paleo and Dinosaur mailing lists. The SVP Ethics Committee is considering the case. Thorough investigations (in contrast to the farce that was the DCA's attempt) take time, and patience is needed. But that doesn't mean we can't talk about it, nor does it mean that we shouldn't talk about it.

Regardless of whether Spencer Lucas is innocent or guilty of any charges against him, the New Mexico Department for Cultural Affairs has made a mockery of any kind of investigation policy it has. Apart from the large number of palaeontologists calling foul (some louder than others), it has embarrassed the New Mexico Academy of Science. So it's not just us.

However, as Mickey Rowe said, SVP has no power over the museum or the state. Whatever decision it comes to, while there is an outside chance the DCA may finally sit up and take notice, they don't have to pay any attention and could quite happily flip the bird at the Ethics Committee. So regardless of the investigation by SVP, pressure still needs to be applied to the New Mexico government. Mickey has drafted a sample letter for people to send to Governor Bill Richardson.

I don't know how much notice Governor Richardson will take of international letters. Possibly more than he'll take of New Mexican letters. I have to say, this coupled with the absolutely shit time Paul and I had in Lost Causes Las Cruces, has not endeared the Land Of Enchantment to me. But it's worth a try, right?

This is uncharted territory for the Ethics Committee. But at some point in an institution's life everything is new and untested. This is the first public case I am aware of in palaeontology. It has been alluded to that there were earlier cases, whether investigated or not, of alleged plagiarism. I think it is certainly much easier to pick up on such breaches now the entire world is connected via the internet. Twenty years ago, there would not have been a British palaeontologist condensing and organising all the material for the American students' case. The Polish students may not have read the paper on their specimens until some time after its publication. Look back to the February 1994 archive of the DML and see that there were only a handful of e-mails per day. Compare that to the February 2004 archive.

What I do hope is that the Ethics Committee recognise that this may not be the last time such a situation arises, and that their role can encompass much more than the sale of fossils issues the committee was formed to deal with. Regardless of the eventual outcome. And I really do mean that.