Dr. Dean Lomax

And there was a teacher, a substitute teacher who was brought in.

Well, I've kept in touch with actually over the years, a guy called, he was called Mr. Bonacorsi Renato.

And he was going around the class like, you know, what do you want to do and all this sort of stuff.

And I was like, I want to be a paleontologist.

And he was like, what the hell is that?

And so I had to tell him what it was.

And he said, well, how are you going to get there?

And I said, oh, you know, this, this, this, this.

And he said, what's one of the best places in the world?

I says, well, America, American Midwest is great.

It's you kind of get your foot on the ladder of field work and all that lot.

So anyway, I drafted up an email.

reached out to a bunch of institutions and one of them... Well, several of them got back and the best one was this place in Wyoming, the Wyoming Dinosaur Center, who said, you can volunteer with us.

If you can get yourself out here, raise enough money, they'd put me up for accommodation for like three and a half, four months.

And that got me into my foot on the ladder.

I went out there and then after that, it was for the first time I was like, right, I kind of just about got my foot on the ladder.

I don't know how I'm going to get into this professionally because I didn't have the degree or anything like that.

But I was like, right, I'm going to work my ass off.

But the way I looked at it...

That trip was very much career-defining, and it was kind of an all-or-nothing approach.