Dr. Dean Lomax

A teacher, yeah.

And it was one of the careers advisors.

I remember going into the room kind of like, oh, what do you want to do sort of thing?

I said, oh, well, I'm gaining experience collecting fossils and wanted to learn about dinosaurs and things.

They said, well, stop that nonsense and go and get a real job.

I can't quite put my finger on that one key thing, but as far back as I can remember, I've had that love of natural history, fossils, dinosaurs, kind of watching TV documentaries, movies, things like Jurassic Park, you might imagine, but also like Land Before Time, which probably hit some nostalgia.

But also visiting museums and collecting fossils and reading books.

So there was this kind of a collective thing that just stayed with me.

Ichthyosaurs are a group of ancient marine reptiles.

They sort of look a little bit like dolphins or sharks, but they are reptiles.

They're often misidentified as swimming dinosaurs, but they were swimming around in the oceans and the seas whilst dinosaurs were walking on land.

They appeared roughly 250 million years ago in what's called the Triassic period.

And then they went extinct around about 90 million years ago in the Cretaceous period.

But they were a highly successful group of prehistoric animals.

And they're genuinely really fascinating to study.

They were, yeah, to a point.

Absolutely, yeah.

So they were all predators and some of them...

evolved within their respective environments they were kind of top of the food chain hunting pretty much everything you can imagine we've even had direct evidence from some of them where you have their last meals preserved of say fish and squid but there's a few that have marine reptiles preserved in their stomach and hatchling turtles and one of them even contained a bird

Goodness me.