Dr. Dean Lomax

Have you actually not named anything after yourself?

No, so you can't do that.

So there's this body of work that basically, when you discover something new, and especially if it's something new to science, like a new species, if you were proposing that name...

let's say if I was going to call it Dean Legendosaurus or something, and we submitted that to a scientific journal, your peers, so all the paleontologists, have to review that as well as that journal.

So they have editors.

And so something like that immediately would be blocked.

But it would also go against... There's a big organization that's called the ICZN, and that's kind of like an international organization that kind of...

looks after the naming of not just prehistoric animals but like living animals you know if we're discovering new species today say for example in the ocean yeah amazon rainforest it's the same process right makes sense just to keep it all above board sort of thing yeah and you can have so much fun with it too i mean i've named uh so far eight nine different species wow and so yeah you can kind of um come up with some really interesting names and what's your favorite

the ones i've named yeah uh i'd probably go with one which uh i mean a team came up with it's a gigantic animal another ichthyosaur but one called ichthyotitan and we it was basically this animal might be one of the biggest animals that ever lived as big as a blue whale if not possibly evidence suggests bigger

Yeah, which is pretty awesome.

And so that like, it was quite a bold name because we were dealing with like giant jaw fragments.

But this one, we were like, when we kind of collectively came up with different names, we were like throwing everything out there.

Like, oh, could we call it this, this, this, this?

And we landed on Ixia Titan.

which is pretty cool because that has this story of ichthyosaurs were first found in britain 200 years ago by mary anning and co on the jurassic coast and lion regis and uh yeah 200 years later we found one that's possibly as big as a blue whale and we call it ichthyotitan it's like the biggest one of them all that's so cool you're kind of like when you're dead and gone you're kind of like putting your stamp on the world aren't you yeah that's such a that's a legacy thing that's it yeah legacy

And it's nice to think about it that way as well, because as is paleontology in science, you're building on top of what's come before.

And so there are people who have worked on this stuff, like I mentioned, like Mary Anning 200 plus years ago, who was finding the first ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs brought to the attention of science.

Little did she know that her name would be still talked about so broadly now around the world.

Haven't you saw named after her by me?

I'm the only one ever named after her.