Dr. Dean Lomax

But one of them, and there's probably a couple others, but one in particular, I remember seeing it.

And it's kind of a...

obviously for me every time you see a fossil for the first time it's quite a magical kind of thing because it's like wow that is a thing that was once living breathing right but this one it was probably in the process of giving birth and the little one got stuck and the adult and that individual and it had another three individuals inside its siblings all perished which is really sad but it tells you so much about the behavior of these animals

Are they not egg-laying ones?

So they weren't.

No, and that's another thing.

So it was long assumed when ichthyosaurs were first found by Mary Anning and Co.

that they were egg-laying because they're reptiles.

They come on land, you know, laid their eggs like turtles and pissed off back into the ocean.

That isn't what happened.

They gave birth at sea, a bit like you think like dolphins today in Wales.

But they had had as many, at least we know of the ones in Germany, like eight fetuses, probably even more some of them.

So, yeah, fossil-related events.

So it was kind of like there are these kind of shows that, in the UK at least, and I guess worldwide, but for me growing up and as a kind of a 13-, 14-year-old teenager wanting to get my kind of foot on the door, there's these events where people have, like, collections, or that they've, you know, maybe a private collector has found stuff on the Jurassic Coast and down in Lyme Regia, sort of along the Yorkshire coast.

So I was brought up collecting.

Obviously, in Doncaster, I used to go to Whitby and find fossils and things there.

What, just on the beach and stuff?

Yeah, just on the beach, yeah, and they'd been eroded from the foreshore and the cliffs, and then you'd find evidence of ancient marine reptiles, of fossil squids and things like that, which used to be pretty cool.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah.

I'm hoping off the back of this, you two are going to be like, right, fuck it, I'm going to go out and go and look for some fossils.