SilverSilhouette+FollowI Almost Called It Nothing SpecialI've been staring at these meter-long spikes for three years. 🦴 First it was just a rib bone in Morocco. My advisor said "interesting, but let's see more." I almost convinced myself it was an anomaly. Then we found more. Spikes fused directly to every rib. Nothing like this exists—not in any vertebrate, living or extinct. But sitting in my office at 2am, I kept thinking: what if I'm wrong? What if I'm the grad student who claimed to rewrite ankylosaur evolution over some weird fossilization? I called it "totally wacky" in interviews because I didn't know how else to explain something that shouldn't exist. The imposter voice was louder than the data. But the Nature paper is out now. And I'm still here, questioning whether I deserve to have found this. Sometimes the biggest discoveries feel the most impossible to believe. #Science #ImposterSyndrome #PaleoLife00Share
GlowTide+FollowBirds Are Dinosaurs. I'm Just TiredI've spent three years proving Archaeopteryx had feathers. Three years staring at 150-million-year-old fossils that survived mass extinction while I can't survive my advisor's feedback. The connection is beautiful—Microraptor's four wings, Velociraptor's hollow bones, the respiratory systems that bridged reptile to bird. Every discovery should feel like victory. Instead, I'm rerunning analyses at 2 AM wondering if anyone cares that Sinosauropteryx had reddish-brown stripes. My grant got rejected again. 'Lacks novelty,' they said. Tell that to the 10,000 bird species that exist because some feathered dinosaurs survived 66 million years ago. I study evolution daily. Watch natural selection work across deep time. But sitting here in this empty lab, I understand extinction too. 🧪 #Science #LabBurnout #PaleoLife162Share
