Saturday School 2004.  Not walking with dinosaurs: the swimming and flying reptiles of the Mesozoic, Vaughan College, Leicester, 21st February 2004

Everybody knows about the dinosaurs in some way or another, whether it’s T rex or Velociraptor, or even our local Cetiosaurus. However, the dinosaurs were not alone on the Mesozoic Earth. This year’s Saturday School cast the spotlight on the often overlooked contemporaries of the dinosaurs; the reptiles that swam in the seas and flew in the air. Some of these have become more familiar in recent years through television series like the BBC’s “Sea Monsters” and “Walking with Dinosaurs”. However, there are many more out there which didn’t make the screen test for the TV makeover. My aim when putting together the meeting was to give a taste of the great diversity of marine and flying reptiles. There was an awful lot to cover, and some fascinating fossil animals only got a few sentences. Others got a more in-depth treatment, with an account of some recent findings. Our speakers, Darren Naish, Will Watts, Mark Evans (I couldn’t resist it), Richard Forrest, Dr Leslie Noè, Dr Dave Martill and Lorna Steel, were assembled from as far a field as the Isle of Wight and North Yorkshire, and met with 55 delegates at Vaughan College in Leicester.

The ancestors of both marine and flying reptiles were terrestrial, and so adaptations for moving and feeding in air and water formed a theme for the meeting. Darren Naish’s whistle-stop tour of marine reptiles certainly brought everybody up to speed. The following sessions looked in greater detail at the two major groups, the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. Any perceived bias of the meeting towards the latter group is obviously nothing to do with my own particular interests (well, perhaps a bit), but really is a result of the relatively large number of people working on these animals, compared to the other groups. Vertebrate palaeontologists are thin on the ground, despite the great interest of the general population in things saurian.

The last two talks of the day looked at the pterosaurs, the first vertebrates to really conquer the air. Recent discoveries have revealed them to be much more bizarre then we had previously thought. Some look at if they could never have existed, let alone actually have flown. I hope that all those who came to the meeting went away with a better idea of what was swimming and flying alongside the dinosaurs For those who couldn’t make it, abstracts for the meeting can be found on the website.

In addition to thanking the speakers for an excellent day, I would like to thank Andrew Swift and Arthur Cruickshank for chairing the sessions, and the staff at Vaughan College. Watch out for news of next year’s Saturday School!

Mark Evans

Saturday School speakers. From l to r: Darren Naish, Dave Martill, Richard Forrest, Lorna Steel, Lesley Noe, Arthur Cruickshank (one of the chairmen), Will Watts and Mark Evans