Dr. Dean Lomax

Anyway, I was right.

And that was a real specimen.

Yes.

So when I was there, I often heard the paleontologists and the students talking about papers and they're like, oh, have you read this paper?

Have you seen this paper?

Now, I naively thought they meant newspapers.

And of course, they meant academic papers.

Peer reviewed journals.

And I was like, well, I had no idea what that was.

And so I mentioned that and said it and everybody laughed.

And it was a bit of a bit of a funny thing that I was teased over the summer.

No, not at all.

Initially, it wasn't because I had only been given this kind of crash course of, hey, this is academia.

You're writing academic papers and things, putting that trip to Wyoming.

I happened to be working with two marine reptile experts who work on ichthyosaurs, Professor Judy Massera and Bill Wall, who basically, once I come across this ichthyosaur, they encouraged me to write it up.

And they said, look, we'll help as your guide, as it were, to writing this.

And I still have those first few drafts.

And I mean, they're horrendous.

If I look at them now, they're terrible.

But yeah, as you say, that was my first paper describing that ichthyosaur as a real specimen with its last meal preserved of fish and squid remains.