Dr. Dean Lomax

I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Went behind the scenes.

And staring at me was this thing that was about a meter long, long toothy jaws, part of like the ribs, the vertebrae, the parts of the spine.

And I just remember looking at it thinking, this looks too good to be a replica.

I'm pretty sure this is real.

And then it had this dark mass between the ribs, which turned out to be its last meal.

And its last meal was preserved between its ribs.

And it contained like the remains of fish, fish scales, and these tiny hooks from the arms of squid.

So what could have been a Wednesday afternoon, this ichthyosaur was feeding on fish and squid before it died.

And that, for me, even as an 18-year-old, I knew there and then, I was like, this is real.

And never did I know that it would send me down this path of academia and publishing.

Why did they not know it was real?

Yeah, so that was something we've kind of discussed over the years.

And I think the biggest issue that had happened with it, in the museum kind of world, you talk about curation.

So when a fossil or whatever object it is, it gets brought into a museum, you give it a number, you identify it, that sort of thing.

Because they didn't have a specialist, I believe they had it mixed up with another type of ancient reptile, I think called a plesiosaur, which you think of like the Loch Ness Monster, that sort of thing.

And that actually was a replica.

And I think somebody at one point had got them mixed up.

Oh, okay.

How?