Sea dragons of Avalon

Abstract

• Tourists driving through the village2 of Street on their way to Glastonbury might well wonder at the representation of a skeleton on the road sign. Could this perhaps be a warning that this stretch of the A39 is a roadkill hotspot? I (Stig Walsh, once a local inhabitant) suspect that the skeleton’s true identity may be far from what most outsiders expect of this part of Somerset (and most locals too). Cider, cheddar cheese, sheepskins, sensible shoes and scratched vinyl LPs of ‘The Best of the Wurzels’ probably rank highly in a top ten list of ‘objects found on and around the Somerset Levels’; Mesozoic ichthyosaurs probably wouldn’t make the top 40. Street nonetheless has an important place in the history of vertebrate palaeontology, and the PalAss review seminar held in late July was organised to look at what can be said about those fossils today.