Matt and I are just back from the first DinoCon, a British dinosaur convention hosted at Exeter University by Darren Naish (the silent partner at SV-POW!) and colleagues. Among other things, it was a great chance for the three of us to get together, for the first time since the 2019 SVPCA on the Isle of Wight.

It was a pretty amazing event: about 800 people, I believe, including a few professional palaeontologists, lots of amateur enthusiasts, straight up fans, and quite a few kids. Because of the wide mix of levels of expertise, I was a bit concerned about how the talks should be pitched, but in the end I think nearly everything was accessible to nearly everyone. (It helped that the talks were in generous one-hour slots — 45 minutes plus a Q&A. So there was time to explain bits of background in a way that’s neither necessary nor possible when speaking in a 20-minute slot at SVPCA.)

Highlights included Hillary McLean’s talk on what a preparator does and Kieran Satchell’s survey of the Jurassic coast. But I’m not just blowing smoke when I say that the best talk of the weekend for me was Matt’s “The Sauropod Heresies”. He convincingly explained why, once sauropods had landed on their body plan, they never made any fundamental changes. (There are no aquatic, arborial, cursorial, meaningfully dwarfed, carnivorous, fossorial or short-necked big-headed sauropods.)

Bringing a novel palaeobiological hypothesis to a mixed audience, and justifying it with evidence, is a tough needle to thread. Matt’s blend of hard science, relevant anecdotes and dumb jokes was perfectly calibrated not just to bring the audience along with him, but to leave them with solid understanding of things most of them had probably never thought about before.

There’s loads more that could be said about DinoCon, but I’m going to leave it here as I’m preparing curries for Matt and his son London. I’m sure Matt will have thoughts of his own in due time.

I leave you with this: