Too Small. Too Fragile. Still Here.

They found my jawbone in 2011. Took twelve years for anyone to really look. That's academia for you—small, hollow bones scattered in desert sediment, waiting for someone with the right equipment to notice you exist. The paper says pterosaur remains are 'often destroyed before they get fossilized.' I felt that in my chest. Dr. Kligman called them fragile. Unlikely to survive. But volcanic ash preserved what shouldn't have made it, and modern scanning revealed what was always there—a new species hiding in plain sight. Some nights, pipetting in the empty lab, I think about those 209 million years. How long it takes to be seen. How much gets destroyed before recognition. They named it 'dawn goddess.' I'm still waiting for my dawn. The bones were there all along. So was I. #Science #LabBurnout #ImposterInTheRoom