Dean Lomax

And so I mentioned that and said it.

And everybody laughed.

And it was a bit of a funny thing that I was teased over the summer.

No, not at all.

Initially, it wasn't because I had only been given this kind of crash course of, hey, this is academia, you're writing academic papers and things, putting that trip to Wyoming.

I happened to be working with two marine reptile experts who work on ichthyosaurs, Professor Judy Massera and Bill Wall.

who basically, once I come across this ichthyosaur, they encouraged me to write it up.

And they said, look, we'll help as your kind of guide, as it were, to writing this.

And I still have those first few drafts.

And I mean, they're horrendous.

If I look at them now, they're terrible.

But yeah, as you say, that was my first paper describing that ichthyosaur as a real specimen with its last meal preserved of fish and squid remains.

And it was published in a journal in New York.

Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

So the fact that it went from being thought to be a replica, being actively used in the education department, to then becoming the holotype, so the founding specimen of a new species, is quite remarkable.

And so I actually teamed up with Professor Judy Masserey

who has been such an incredible supporter of my career over the years, and we named it as a new species to science.

We called it Ichthyosaurus aningae in honour of the wonderful pioneering paleontologist Mary Anning, who is somebody I'd read so much about as a child, and she was a real hero of mine.

As a youngster growing up in Doncaster, many of our family trips ended up going to the Yorkshire coastline.

And so I'd say, hey, could we go collecting fossils in Whitby?