These days I find myself going less to platform presentations and more to posters. Poster sessions (and parties and receptions) find me wandering around in a Lévy-Flight pattern hoping to bump into something or someone interesting, and making myself available to delegates who want to pitch me a paper (yes, it happens.) Platform presentations seem so often to be by people fulfilling contractual obligations – you know, they’d only get funds to go if they were giving a paper. It’s all too easy to be stuck for 30 minutes in a talk whose title promised much but proved a clunker.

Palaeontology meetings can be really adventurous. Every so often you find yourself in a small huddle and someone will bring out, from an inside pocket, a fossil or snapshot of something really, really weird and show it round to for the opinion of delegates – that’s how I saw the first picture of the first feathered dinosaur to be published. Now, that’s a tale. It was a Chinese delegate to a meeting in NYC, who showed it round to the assembled palaeontologists. Naturally I gave the delegate my contact details (on half a beermat – I am never with proper business cards when I really need ‘em) and in due course the paper made it into Your Favourite etc.

Fifteen years later I met the same scientist in Nanjing, almost by chance. He opened his wallet … and pulled out the same torn beermat upon which I’d written my details all those years before.

Stephen, I can’t wait to read your blog about your big discovery!

As for conferences – I’m kind of with Henry on this. I’ve been to my share I suppose, but the only really memorable things are after-hours discussions, and the occasional keynote talk. The onslaught of concurrent sessions, vendor-sponsored lunchtime workshops and panels, and posters… haven’t left much of an impression.

And these days meetings are much more about networking – a chance to catch up with collaborators from around the world, and to talk to industrial or pharma partners. But it was at one meeting in Florida back in 2005 that a chat over a beer led to a project that culminated in a study that led to a paper now in press at a journal much loved by Henry. The story of how this all happened will be the subject of a blog, and may well be of more general interest than the discovery we made.