ANNING'S LIFE & TIMES

[darren.naish@port.ac.uk]

September '99 is looking like THE vert palaeo conference month of all 
time. We have the Symposium of Palaeontological Preparation and 
Conservation going on right now, SVPCA starting this Wednesday, then 
the Second Symposium on Secondary Adaptation to Life in Water at 
Copenhagen, and then the Dinosaur Eggs and Babies Symposium in Spain 
and the British Association meeting at Sheffield, UK (Farlow, Norman, 
Padian, Horner and Benton will all be talking). Of course, October 
has SVP. It is a busy time.

Yesterday (Sunday) I spent the day at the Dorset County Museum, 
Dorchester UK, just in time for the very last day of their acclaimed 
Mary Anning Exhibition (which has used marine reptiles as its main 
selling point). Never before has so much information on Anning, her 
family, and her times been presented in one exhibition, and there was 
much information new to me. I was very surprised to discover, for 
example, that Anning died of breast cancer. Replicas of some of 
Anning's finds were displayed, including a temnodontosaur and three 
_Ichthyosaurus_ specimens. A life-sized photograph (about 5 m 
long) pictured the complete skeleton of _Plesiosaurus macrocephalus_, 
an unusual long-headed species (but not a _Macroplata_ - it has a 
very elongate neck) that might be in the NHM, I cannot recall. Fairly 
good models of an ichthyosaur and plesiosaur are currently in the 
window of the museum - I kicked myself for not having fixed my 
camera.

Though the museum has, thanks to recent lottery grants, produced some 
fantastic new displays on local archaeology and my distant relative 
poet/author Thomas Hardy, it has sadly not updated its geology wing 
since the 1960s. All the specimens are exactly the same as on the 
many other times I have viewed them excepting the fact that two of 
the specimens I most wanted to see, a cast of the incomplete 
_Liopleurodon macromerus_ skull [type of _Stretosaurus_ Tarlo] and 
(the probable dromaeosaur) _Nuthetes_, were not on display. To be 
fair, two new turtles and a newly discovered _Steneosaurus_ are now 
in the cabinets. Unfortunately I have never had the opportunity to 
visit the basement collections at Dorchester but recommend that 
anyone visiting UK museums for marine reptiles do so.

Tomorrow morning I'm leaving for Edinburgh and the SVPCA conference. 
Besides the conference, this means visits to the National Museum of 
Scotland and to the Edinburgh Zoo. Can't wait: see y'all in a week.

DARREN NAISH 
PALAEOBIOLOGY RESEARCH GROUP
School of Earth, Environmental & Physical Sciences
UNIVERSITY OF PORTSMOUTH
Burnaby Building
Burnaby Road                           email: darren.naish@port.ac.uk
Portsmouth UK                          tel: 01703 446718
P01 3QL                               [COMING SOON: 
http://www.naish-zoology.com]