Turtle Evolution Symposium 2018

The Symposium on Turtle Evolution is a scientific meeting for discussions on every aspect about turtle evolution and systematics. This is the first time it is held in Asia and the host institution is the School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University. The meeting will take place at the conference room of the 11th Building on Waseda Campus in Tokyo, Japan. Turtle Symposiums started as focused on fossil turtles only. The first was the “Premiere table ronde international sure les tortues fossile”, held at the Institut de Páleontologie, Paris, France in 1983, and organized by mainly France de Broin. Twenty years later, in 2003, an international team led by Igor Danilov organized the second meeting, the “Symposium on Turtle Origins, Evolution and Systematics”, that was held at the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In 2009, Donald Brinkman and collaborators organized the “Gaffney Turtle Symposium”, in honor of Eugene Gaffney, at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, Drumheller, Canada. In 2012, Walter Joyce, Joe Corsini, Ingmar Werneburg, and Márton Rabi organized the Symposium on Turtle Evolution, which was held at the Department of Geosciences of the University of Tu¨bingen, Germany. Three yeas ago, in 2015, Pedro Romano and Gustavo Oliveira organized the Fifth Symposium on Turtle Evolution at the Museu Nacional of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This was first turtle meeting to be hosted on the South Hemisphere. Also in Rio de Janeiro, the venue of the next event – Tokyo, Japan – was voted by the attendants. Therefore, the sixth meeting regarding the evolution of turtles will finally be hosted in Asia for the first time. The 6th Turtle Evolution Symposium will include 40 oral and poster presentations from May 26th to May 27th, 2018. In addition to one poster session, five thematic sessions for oral presentations will be organized: “Early Evolution”, “Living Turtles”, “Functional Morphology”, “Mesozoic Turtles”, and “Cenozoic Turtles”. Also, two keynote lectures, “Development and Evolution of the Turtle Shell” on the first day, and “Two New Paracryptodire Turtles from Western Canada” on the second day, will take place. So far, participants have been confirmed from 15 different countries: Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, Thailand, and USA, setting a broad group for discussion. At first glance, the Turtle Evolution Symposium seems to be very restricted – considering that it is focused on a single vertebrate group. On the other hand, the variety of presentations reveals a wide range of research areas. The main focus is to understand how evolution works using turtles as a model. Based on this background, the presentations will address a variety of topics – for example the use of radiology and medical imaging tools, genomics, geometric morphometric, taxonomy, systematic, paleontology, molecular biology, zoology etc.