Mesh problem on ros kinetic but not indigo

I have a urdf which uses meshes for visualisation. I can open the urdf fine from ros indigo with Gazebo 7 (I unistalled Gazebo 2). However, I cannot open the urdf from my ros launch file. I get the following error: terminate called after throwing an instance of 'Ogre::InvalidParametersException' what(): OGRE EXCEPTION(2:InvalidParametersException): Header chunk didn't match either endian: Corrupted stream? in Serializer::determineEndianness at /build/ogre-1.9-jztnFF/ogre-1.9-1.9.0+dfsg1/OgreMain/src/OgreSerializer.cpp (line 89) I found that if I remove the mesh reference and it runs without problems (but with no visuals, of course). The mesh is called from the urdf: inside of the link tag. The code ran fine on 2 PCs with ROS Indigo + Gazebo7 but could not run on any ROS Kinetic comps. Any ideas as to why/ how to fix this?