Dr. Dean Lomax

I'm currently doing like the book tour for the Secret Eyes of Dinosaurs.

And sometimes you'll get hundreds of people, thousands of people come to an event.

And I mean, it's so humbling.

The longest queue we've had, it's like two and a half hours of people have queued to come and chat dinosaurs and paleo with me.

And I want to take the time to listen to people.

And you don't know what that's going to spark.

I've had people now who...

volunteered for me maybe 10 years ago or even more recently who have then kind of reached out to me like hey you know i spoke to you for half an hour your discussion with me sparked this interest and now i have a full-time job and i'm like that's such a lovely thing and and i know going back to those people who were really you know real assholes with me early on which was very discouraging i could have been like oh yeah i'll give up because it's a super difficult field to get into but actually i know full well from learning from that i'm like i'm not like that anyway but i'd just be more encouraging and

And say, hey, I'm never going to say what's easy to get into because it's very hard.

But I want to be realistic and say, you've got to just gain this experience, volunteer.

Yeah, I hope so.

Yeah.

And yeah, that's also inspiring as well to hear a bit more about your kind of backstory with it too.

Because it is the sort of thing, it's a very different world now.

And especially I mentioned before, there's more paleontologists alive now and there's more jobs.

And that's more so with not just in academia or kind of like, you know, field work, but also social media.

public engagement there are more jobs where museums universities probably last five ten years are kind of like kind of sat up and said oh actually it's important that we hire people paleontologists who know this sort of stuff and can actually communicate properly with the public and get people excited by the the subject for sure for sure uh i want to go back to um where were we was in wyoming uh one thing i'm fascinated by uh and again just before we start we were talking about pokemon

Yeah, that's great.

Really good comparison as well.

I love that.