Dr. Dean Lomax

Dinosaurs in the British Isles, we have roughly...

about 85 different species of dinosaur that have been found here, like Baryonyx.

And the Isle of Wight is among the best places in the whole of Europe to find dinosaurs, for example.

Is it?

Yeah.

So you can find this stuff.

So growing up in Doncaster, Doncaster was a...

a coal mining town, and we'd never find dinosaurs because the geology is far older.

It's roughly 310 million years old.

So that's even long before dinosaurs.

So all those fossils, already the fossils under the feet of dinosaurs, which is mind-blowing.

Things before even dinosaurs were a thing.

But I had grown up kind of thinking, oh, you can't find fossils here.

Lo and behold, when I began volunteering at Doncaster, I was like, oh, I got some of the volunteers and museum staff excited about fossils.

We went and bloody found a fossil site five minutes from the house I grew up in.

And it was all these fossils of fossil plants and insects and fossil poo.

And I even found a shark egg case.

Because some sharks, they lay these soft-shelled eggs.

A shark egg case in Doncaster.

And that was the first ever in South Yorkshire.