I may have misspoke with "regular". There's definitely scope and interest for this to happen again, though (and if so, certainly not for 2-3 years at least).

Thanks to the conference organisers - Nigel Larkin, Emma Nicholls, Dean Lomax and Mark Evans - for a great week of talks and events. Should this be a regular meeting? Yep.

Went to Crocodiles of the World today to conclude the Oxford Marine Reptile Conference. Much time spent time with amazing, hyper-charismatic reptiles and made loads of cool observations, including the teeth-sheathing gingiva of a Komodo dragon, high walking Nile crocs and nippy Galapagos tortoises.

As you've indicated, it's really locomotion + the need to come onto land that's the issue here, and theropods seem steadfast in never going quadrupedal. That's going to be an issue if they want to start wriggling out of the sea at any sort of large size.

They're gigantic. The Mesozoic was filled with horsetails that could hide good-sized dinosaurs.

Either way, I guess the maximum size of a Thalassoraptor-like animal is something we can have fun with, and the exact figure won't alter the main point (that their maximum size would be way below that of other marine tetrapods).

Likewise, with turtles being soft-shellers, can we rule out that giant species developed live birth? I don't know what the consensus on this is, but rhere might be aspects of their limb anatomy that tell whether Archelon et al. were still crawling onto land.

I could be wrong on this, but pseudosuchians were ancestrally laying soft shelled eggs, so they could evolve viviparity until hard shells became the norm. To my knowledge, we don't yet know when that happened. Could be after the thalattosuchian split?

The question on maximum size is an interesting one. I went with modern size limits of land-based marine tetrapod reproduction (pinnipeds) for Thalassoraptor because I'm unsure if we can rule out that big marine crocs and turtles were viviparous.

Absolutely no problems with melanin-rich dinosaurs. Strongly melanised dorsums are known from a couple of dinosaurs now, and there's no reason to think some species/individuals couldn't push that even further.

Please finish this, it already looks great! But don't use Dimorphodon as the insect chaser, it likely didn't have the flight agility to hawk insects. Campylognathoides would be a better bet.

Thanks, it's strange to me that I remember drawing them after all this time. Those perpendicular creases are where the paper was folded to fit into my school blazer pocket, as I was drawing them at school between lessons.

And just for fun, because I seem to have them saved in the same directory, here are Deinonychus predation scenes that I drew when I was 13-14 years old. They are preying on iguanodonts because Cretaceous sauropods weren't on the radar when I was small.