Dr. Dean Lomax

But I kept seeing that kind of bigger picture aspect.

And I mean, I even remember, Jim, at one point, my mom and my older sister, Julie, sitting down with me and saying, we're going to fully support you as best as we can.

But are you sure this is going to work out?

It's been a couple of years now.

Dean, and obviously there's nothing else on the horizon.

You don't have the degrees or anything.

And I remember saying, I'll be OK.

And I'm very slowly getting my foot on that ladder and keep going up.

Well, you didn't have a plan B. No, I didn't.

Constantly, yeah.

Especially my earlier career, the first kind of five years.

Even some people in the field of paleontology were quite dismissive of my kind of unconventional career and even saying, oh, you won't make it in this field.

So those sorts of things were very tough.

Yeah, so I continued volunteering at the museum at Doncaster and we were doing various different projects.

One thing that always struck me was that there were very few fossils from Doncaster.

Despite the fact Doncaster is a coal mining town, you'd expect to be finding lots of fossil plants and things like that.

So working with the archaeologist, Peter, and another colleague, Brian...

We said, hey, why don't we just try and check out all these old spoil tip sites around Doncaster?

And we had a long list of them and we went to many of them and we didn't find anything.

And then the last one on my list was literally five minutes drive from the house I grew up.