Dr. Dean Lomax

There was one of my colleagues, Dr. Judith Pardo-Perez, who had dedicated her...

at least literally like five years plus there, did a PhD and stuff on this material.

And she was like almost burst into tears with it because it was such a pivotal find because like finding juveniles of ancient reptiles and things is quite rare.

They're a lot smaller, a lot more difficult to find.

And so to find that, it helps kind of piece together like parts of her research and that.

But yeah, that was pretty epic.

Yeah, great question, Jack.

And that, it was like genuinely like pure serendipity.

Back in, I think it was the 80s or maybe early 90s,

There was a team of Japanese glaciologists studying the glacier, like how quickly it was retreating, like climate change and stuff.

And one of them just happened to find a few bones in the bedrock.

And on the whim of that, they reported it to the local kind of geological museum and institute back in the 80s, 90s.

And they were like, oh, yeah, that sounds interesting.

And then over the years, there's been...

maybe about 10 15 kind of hunts like trips to this site and as a result that particular area has become known what's like a sea dragon graveyard we found nearly a hundred ichthyosaurs when when i was there we were finding two and a half a day a day and and you're walking in places where no other humans been yeah because it's it's so remote but also because the glace is retreating so it's just revealing more and more of these things which is that's so cool that's so interesting and

And which animal?

I would probably go because my pet dog, Lucy, has put up with so much of my shit.

And often when I'm writing a paper or trying to get kind of the creative juices flowing to write a book, I'm kind of like, Lucy, what do you think of this?

And she looks at me and is like...

So probably I'd be like, do you actually enjoy this stuff or what?