i was wondering if you would be willing to talk about your experience as a nb person in the naturalist/ science education field? especially as somebody who uses they/them? do you generally just let misgendering slide? how about with colleagues? (im just getting started in the ecology field, and seasonal jobs are so short i dont even bother for a lot of them, mostly because im unsure of sure how to navigate this stuff) private or public at ur discretion (might have submitted twice sorry)
With the public I generally just don’t say anything. I prefer to be viewed as androgynous, but I’ve had to accept that in a society with fairly gendered language, which teaches us to automatically categorize strangers as Male or Female immediately upon meeting them, most people around me are going to decide I’m a woman and a handful of them are going to decide I’m a man (or, more likely, a boy).
It’s a common occurrence for children to gender me as male and for their parents to loudly correct them, to the point where when I hear someone hiss “that is a lady” in my general vicinity I just assume it’s about me. If it happens during a conversation I’m a part of, my priority is usually making sure a child doesn’t think anybody is mad at them for, well, reading my appearance with a reasonable degree of accuracy. I usually just say “It’s no problem, I don’t mind being called a boy,” and try to move the conversation along, but that’s about as in depth as I get with strangers. Even though I’m not technically a ranger anymore, naturalists at one park I work at introduce themselves with the title of Ranger, and I appreciate that I can correct folks who try to tell their kids to call me Miss or Mrs. with “it’s just Ranger Mel.”
With my colleagues, I have had a couple of them outright ask me what pronouns I use, but even after having those conversations I’ve never noticed anyone consistently using They for me. My workplaces tend to be very small, like Fewer Than Five Employees small, so my desire to not create an environment where my coworkers feel like they have to be vigilantly correcting themselves and making it awkward for both of us usually outweighs my desire to be referred to correctly.
One time I stopped by a work event on my day off because I was in the area, and I had forgotten that I was wearing a jacket with a THEY/THEM pin on it until a ranger reached out and poked the pin and smiled and said “I like that.” I think about that moment whenever I get self-conscious about wearing a pronoun pin around my coworkers.
Time and Place: 227 to 200 million years ago, from the Norian to Rhaetian of the Late Triassic
Diphydontosaurus is known from Southern England and Wales, and possibly also from Northern Italy.
Physical Description: Diphydontosaurus is an early-derived relative of the tuatara, one of the oldest in fact. Like the tuatara, it resembles a lizard in appearance, probably even more so than living tuataras. It was also very small too. Like, really small. 10 centimetres long from head-to-tail with a skull less than 15 millimetres long, small. The skull itself has massive eyes and a pretty short snout, so it was probably a rather cute looking little reptile. The most distinctive features of Diphydontosaurus are its jaws and teeth. Living tuataras have their teeth fused to the jaw bones (acrodont), which wear down and can’t be replaced. Diphyodontosaurus has these teeth at the back of its jaws, but the teeth in front were attached in sockets (pleurodont), like some lizards. These teeth were sharp and peg-like, perfect for puncturing the carapaces of insects, while the teeth at the back formed a shear for slicing through them. Diphydontosaurus also lacked the characteristic “beak” at the tip of the jaws found in later sphenodonts, and probably didn’t chew its food the way modern tuataras can (yes, tuataras can chew). Diphydontosaurus would also have had a typmanum, a.k.a. an eardrum, visible at the back of its head, again like most lizards but unlike the living tuatara.
Diet: Diphydontosaurus was insectivorous, as evidenced by its small size and teeth, although like some living insular lizards it may have eaten plants to supplement its diet.
Behavior: Diphydontosaurus was likely an active predator or insects and other small arthropods. Its large eyes and well developed ear openings indicate that it likely relied heavily on these senses for hunting and catching prey. They may have especially congregated around the abundant fissures and sinkholes in their habitat, where moist soils and plants would have attracted plenty of insects and other arthropods, and so too the Diphydontosaurus. Being small would have been handy for clambering over steep rock faces after prey, out of reach of other, larger reptiles.
Ecosystem: Diphydontosaurus was part of a diverse collection of island ecosystem in the latest Triassic of Europe, populating low-lying islands of limestone pockmarked with deep fissures and caves eroded into the karst. The species found on each island differed, but there was some broad similarities. The largest land animals on these islands were the possibly dwarfed prosauropod dinosaurs Thecodontosaurus and Pantydraco, as well as small theropods. Pseudosuchian archosaurs were here too, including the small predator Terrestrisuchus and the enigmatic Aenigmaspina, both extremely long-legged, agile animals well suited for navigating the karst-riddled landscape. There was also a drepanosaur around, as well as the gliding reptiles Kuehneosaurus and Kuehneosuchus whose affinities remain mysterious. They could be lepidosaurs like sphenodonts, or, they may belong to the strange allokotosaurs on the archosaur side of the tree! The jury is still out on them. Some of the islands also hosted small mammaliaforms, including Morganucodon and Eozostrodon.
Stem-tuataras like Diphydontosaurus were remarkably diverse, and it coexisted with numerous other genera such as Gephyrosaurus, Clevosaurus, and Planocephalosaurus, each with multiple species, and there are still more new types of sphenodont to be described! Such a high density of different sphenodonts on these islands implies they were all specialised for different ways of life. Diphydontosaurus was one of the most abundant of all sphenodonts on the islands of Late Triassic Europe, no doubt thanks to its small size and insectivorous diet. However, this small size left it vulnerable, and it may have been preyed upon by its larger, more predatory cousins like Clevosaurus.
Other: Diphydontosaurus is one of the oldest known, and is the earliest diverging, sphenodont, the group of animals that includes living tuataras but excludes the even earlier-diverging rhyncocephalians, the gephyrosaurids (the distinction isn’t huge, mostly that gephyrosaurids have completely pleurodont teeth). The anatomy of Diphydontosaurus was unexpected compared to modern tuataras, which are so often described as ‘living fossils’ unchanged since the Mesozoic. In fact, certain features of Diphydontosaurus and other early sphenodonts reveal that the modern tuatara is actually pretty derived compared to its ancestors, especially so in the skull, including the loss of its external ears, its shearing teeth and the ability to chew food. Diphydontosaurus really just goes to show you can’t judge a 200 million year old clade by its sole extant member, eh?
~ By Scott Reid
Sources under the Cut
Whiteside D.I. (1986). "The head skeleton of the Rhaetian sphenodontid Diphydontosaurus avonis gen. et sp. nov., and the modernising of a living fossil". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 312 (1156): 379–430.
Whiteside, D.I., Duffin, C.J., Gill, P.G., Marshall, J.E.A., Benton, M.J. (2016). “The Late Triassic and Early Jurassic fissure faunas from Bristol and South Wales: stratigraphy and setting”. Palaeontologia Polonica 67, 257–287.
David I. Whiteside, Christopher J. Duffin, (2017). "Late Triassic terrestrial microvertebrates from Charles Moore's "Microlestes" quarry, Holwell, Somerset, UK". Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. 179 (3): 677–705.
Whiteside, D.I., Marshall, J.E.A. (2008). "The age, fauna and palaeoenvironment of the Late Triassic fissure deposits of Tytherington, South Gloucestershire, UK". Geological Magazine. 145 (1): 105–147.
does a vampire only have to bleach/dye their hair once? wait shit so a haircut would be forever thats stressful
well at least in vtm, in order to heal they have to use blood that they drank, otherwise wounds just stay there forever so. maybe if they want their hair to grow they have to use blood too fhjkg
Of all the prehistoric reptile groups, few are given as much disservice as the sphenodonts. Currently represented only by New Zealand’s iconic tuatara, these animals were once widespread, living on most continents. Some, like Homoeosaurus, are even a darling of prehistory books, almost always portrayed as tuatara clones.
In truth, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Sphenodonts were a highly diverse group of animals, comparable with modern lizards in terms of sheer ecomorphological diversity.
We have evidence of small gecko-like insectivores (Geophyrosaurus), large terrestrial herbivores (Priosphenodon), “blade mouthed” forms (clevosaurids), a marine iguana-like herbivorous swimmer (Ankylosphenodon), a fanged marine predator (Palaeopleurosaurus) and even a venomous species (Sphenovipera), among several others...
Does your dnd group take turns dming within a single campaign? Does that work?
no, its just a few months ago my dm was doing a really big move (from oregon to vermont) so he didn’t have time to plan for games, but we still wanted to get together and play since it was probably our last few chances to play together in person, so he let each of us DM a game having to do with the backstories or side plots for our characters. i think having a campaign where the dm switches all the time would be pretty hectic
i think? a while ago you reblogged a really cool little illustrated guide somebody made for dnd and dm-ing but i can't seem to find it anywhere, I was wondering if you knew what I was talking about/ if you had the link to buy it?
oh! do you mean table fables? its like, a random generator in book form. it gives lists of cool ideas for character traits, treasure, curses, etc etc. i actually bought it yesterday since im starting my own campaign and it looks like a really fun and creative resource
have you ever read the sick land? its an epistolary story told through blog posts; serious annihilation novel vibes and i think could definitely count as spatial horror
Omgg no I haven’t but that sounds like it fucks so I will have to look it up, thank you!!
