Dr. Dean Lomax

And that's looking at the exceptional fossils of ichthyosaurs, like soft tissues and things, which is like really cutting edge stuff.

So often, Stevie, it's kind of like you'll have museums.

Obviously, there are paid positions, as you might be a curator, a lecturer, professor, or you might be paid to go and dig up dinosaurs in America or wherever it might be, a paid field paleontologist.

But yeah, it really varies.

And it's one of the things where...

it's very competitive and yeah sometimes you've got to be applying for funding and it's terrible that you end up applying for funding against some of your friends and colleagues and if you're lucky and you get it you're like well I know he didn't get it or she didn't get it which is bad at the same time so it really does vary

Yeah, yeah.

So it's kind of a grey area.

So there is like a market for people who will buy land or buy fossils and then sell them.

And each...

country has kind of their own set of rules and regulations around that.

And so some places, if you found something and you own the land or whatever, or you've got access and you've been given permission, technically, if you found it, you could sell it.

Now, the ideal thing is if you found something new to science or something that's really rare, you donate it, or to a point you might get a paid donation.

But sometimes out with museums, the incentive of universities is that if you go on a cool expedition and you find something amazing, it's hopefully going to be brilliant and it's going to draw lots of interest for the university, for the museum, but also get lots of great PR and things, which is what's happened with some of my work.

I've been really lucky to work on some amazing finds, which has generated some great PR.

A bit of both.

So to kind of put you kind of in my mindset as what this was in kind of the time frame.

So I was at the last few months of school, of secondary school, I was in sixth form.

And I was in a class with about 25 other students who, to be blunt, they were seen as like the students who were going to do nothing.

They were the no hopers and I was in there.