PalAss 2018

This year's PalAss was held in Bristol! The weather wasn't on our side; trekking back and forth between different buildings in the rain wasn't the most fun of experiences, and one of the buildings they decided to use felt cramped for the number of people present. (I hear that the weather did clear up just in time for the post-conference field trips, which I didn't attend.) Other than that, however, it was good to be back and to catch up with everyone there.

The conference dinner was quite atmospheric, taking place in the Bristol Museum and watched over by a Pliosaurus.

As usual, I will list off a few presentations that I found particularly memorable:

• François Therrien's talk on the effects of long-term climate change on Late Cretaceous dinosaur diversity
  
• Tom Stubbs's talk on avialan diversification
  
• Luke Parry's talk on Cambrian stem-gastrotrichs
  
• Thomas Clements's talk on taphonomy of the Mazon Creek
  
• Guillermo Navalón's talk on cranial evolution of strisorians (relevant to my own research...)
  
• Elsa Panciroli's talk on a new specimen of Borealestes (which went on to win the President's Prize)
  
• Delphine Angst's talk on dodo ecology
  
• Laura Cotton's talk on the evolution of large size in Nummulites (I would not have guessed that a talk on foraminiferans could be so entertaining, but it goes to show the value of a good presenter!)
  

Beyond that, I don't have much else to report. As with the other conferences I attended this year, I presented (as a poster in this case) my own ongoing research on strisorian phylogeny and evolution. I still don't have anything ready to publicly unveil on that front, but with luck I'll get to talk a bit more about it in the not-so-distant future.