Dr. Dean Lomax

Yes, sometimes I've worked with a couple of archaeologists and yeah, it actually can be quite mutually beneficial because sometimes there can be locations like one of the sites that I led the excavation of in the UK, the Rutland Sea Dragon.

I don't know if you've ever heard of that.

I've only heard of it when

i was researching is that right yeah so that was a mega find but made in january 2021 initially by a guy who wasn't even looking for fossils chap called joe davis in in rutland in the midlands walking this site they basically lowered the water levels of lagoon find found some big vertebrae i've actually got one with me i'll put it out in a second yeah from that animal wow which is pretty awesome and they found in fact let me grab that now yeah wow so that's actually one of the vertebrae so you can hold that

That's one of the real vertebrae from the Rutland Sea Dragon.

I'm not going to break this, am I?

No, please don't.

Is it heavy?

It's not particularly heavy, but it's quite dense.

It's gone through its process of fossilization.

But kind of finding this sort of stuff, when we were on the site, we actually had a few archaeologists because the site was not just for paleontology because the area had been kind of looked over years and years before.

You find archaeological remains.

And so not too far from this ichthyosaur, there was an arrowhead found.

So we all joke saying, oh, maybe somebody had killed it.

Of course, they didn't live at the same time and all this.

There's arrowhead found nearby.

So the archaeological context can come in handy.

But yeah, that's a real vertebra.

So it's about 12, 13 centimetres across part of the spine of Rutland sea dragon.

Oh, this is part of a spine.