Dean Lomax

Even some people in the field of paleontology were quite dismissive of my kind of unconventional career and even saying, oh, you won't make it in this field.

So those sorts of things were very...

Yes, so I continued volunteering at the museum at Doncaster and we were doing various different projects.

One thing that always struck me was that there were very few fossils from Doncaster.

Despite the fact Doncaster is a coal mining town, you'd expect to be finding lots of fossil plants and things like that.

So working with the archaeologist, Peter, and another colleague, Brian...

We said, hey, why don't we just try and check out all these old spoil tip sites around Doncaster?

And we had a long list of them and we went to many of them and we didn't find anything.

And then the last one on my list was literally five minutes drive from the house I grew up.

And I said, we're not going to find anything there.

Within the space of about five minutes, we found about 10 different fossil plants.

What?

And yeah, and we were like, oh my goodness, you know, maybe this is it.

We've hit Carboniverse Gold.

We ended up finding somewhere in the region about 30 different types of fossil plants, some probably new to science, found remains of horseshoe crabs.

I found an actual fossil shark egg case in Doncaster.

And I ended up writing up this material in a scientific journal.

And we went from finding the site, collecting hundreds of specimens to describing it.

And then that material going on display at the museum.

So kind of leaving a nice mini local legacy there for that material.