It’s true… DinoCon 2025 is go!
Caption: our website banner, featuring art by Natalia Jagielska.
Regular readers of Tetrapod Zoology will know – should know, I think – about the annual Tetrapod Zoology Convention, aka TetZooCon. Following an 11-year run – during which it underwent steady expansion and improvement – it had to come to an end, and 2024’s TetZooCon, the biggest and busiest of them all, was the last. We went out with a bang, as you can see from the article here.
Caption: scenes from the last ever TetZooCon, held at King’s College, central London, in September 2024. It ran smoothly and was a pretty epic success. Images: Georgia Witton-Maclean; Neil Phillips, used with permission.
But that 2024 event was an end, and never intended to be the end. Running and hosting conventions has proved such a rewarding line of work that my aim has long been to expand things further. If only I had the know-how and right set of contacts. To cut a long(ish) story short, plans for the future have worked out. After teaming up with the people behind PalaeoGames – my colleagues Annie Barling, Nathan Barling, and Mike O’Sullivan – I’m proud to announce the existence of an entirely new venture: starting August 2025, we’re hosting the UK’s first large-scale dinosaur-themed convention…. DinoCon, this year occurring on the weekend of August 16th and 17th at the University of Exeter in England’s southwest. Tickets are already on sale.
At the time of writing, we haven’t announced a schedule nor explained exactly what’s happening, but that’s coming soon. Watch the website (and our activity on social media; here on Twitter, here on BSky, here on Facebook) for breaking news. Rest assured that an exciting itinerary involving dinosaur-themed talks, panel discussions, fun workshop events, exhibitions, quizzes and more is coming together. A substantial number of stalls, selling (mostly) dinosaur-themed merch, artwork, models, figures, books, and more will be in attendance, almost certainly in greater number than at any previous UK event. DinoCon is family-friendly and there will be plenty of things to keep kids interested. There will also be plenty of content for adults as well.
Dedicated, dinosaur-themed events have, of course, been hosted in the UK before, but nothing like this. DinoCon really will be on the same scale as the large Comic Cons. I should mention that my previous collaborator in running TetZooCon – palaeoartist and industry mogul John Conway – is still involved and will be running one of a few palaeoart-workshops.
On some practicalities. For those who don’t know southern England, Exeter is some distance (about 317km, or about 200 miles) from London, but it’s close to Bristol (104km or 65 miles) and other cities in the south (the port city Plymouth is 72km/45 miles away; Southampton is 179km/111 miles away). It’s well connected by rail and motorway (the M5 connects it to Wales and the midlands) and has an airport (with direct connections to Amsterdam, Belfast, Dublin, Edinburgh and Glasgow).
Caption: for those of you who don’t know where Exeter is, this map should help. It’s in south Devon, over in the west. Nearby tourist and holiday destinations include Dartmoor National Park, Exmoor National Park, and Lyme Regis and other parts of the Jurassic Coast. Image: © google maps.
On accommodation, numerous hotels, Airbnbs and so on are within a ten-minute drive of the university campus, but our accommodation of choice is the university’s own Holland Halls, places for which can be booked here. Space is limited so don’t leave it to the last minute. If you’re interested in hosting a stall you need to apply for a place here on our website; be aware that spaces are filling up fast, and the April 7th is the deadline for submissions.
Caption: a view from one of the halls of residence… pretty nice! This photo was taken in October 2024. Image: Darren Naish.
Finally, we have every confidence that DinoCon 2025 will be a success, and that other DinoCons will occur in the future, perhaps elsewhere in the UK. While DinoCon is certainly dinosaur-focused and themed, we don’t necessarily intend for DinoCon to be a dinosaurs-only thing, and in time will likely expand to include content on natural history, zoology and biology more broadly. So that’s that for now… more announcements are coming. I hope you’re sufficiently interested to come along, if you can, and I and the rest of the team look forward to seeing you in Exeter in August.
Some useful and relevant links…
