Dean Lomax
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And on my first day, Peter and another chap called Alan, they took me kind of behind the scenes, showed me the fossils, and they showed me this one specimen, and it was about a metre and a half long, that they thought was a replica of an ichthyosaur.
Well, just a plaster cast.
Yeah, exactly.
They thought it was a plaster cast of an ichthyosaur.
And so I'm staring at it, and I'm thinking...
Hmm.
If that's a plaster cast, then it's a very good plaster cast.
I said, I'm confident this is real.
It even had like a dark mass between its ribs.
And I said, oh, maybe that's its stomach contents.
Anyway, I was right.
And that was a real specimen.
Yes.
So when I was there, I often heard the paleontologists and the students talking about papers.
And they're like, oh, have you read this paper?
Have you seen this paper?
Now, I naively thought they meant newspapers.
And of course, they meant academic papers.
Peer-reviewed journals.
And I was like, well, I had no idea what that was.