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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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First on BBC Sounds. Imagine being told as a teenager that you're not clever enough to make it as a scientist. A paleontologist, to be more specific. Then proving those voices wrong by discovering some of the largest prehistoric creatures to have ever roamed the seas. No, this isn't some boy-done-good movie plot. It's the true story of today's guest.
Dr Dean Lomax is now one of the world's leading experts on ichthyosaurs, marine reptiles that once ruled our prehistoric seas. But his journey has been anything but conventional. Growing up in Doncaster, Dean's thirst to learn everything he could about fossils and dinosaurs somewhat outstripped his academic achievements.
He failed his science GCSEs and then his A-levels and was told by teachers to give up on his dreams. But passion has a way of rewriting expectations. At the age of 18, Dean sold his beloved childhood Star Wars collection to fund a fossil dig in the United States. Not long after that, a chance discovery led him to publish his first scientific paper when he was just 20.
Since then, he's discovered multiple new species, presented TV shows and written books for both adults and kids. proof, if it were needed, that it's worth challenging people who tell you you can't do something. Dean Lomax, welcome to The Life Scientific. It's a great pleasure to be here.
So, as a youngster, you had to get past some really disheartening advice from your elders and supposedly betters. Is it true someone actually told you to stop playing with dinosaurs and get a real job? That is true. Was that a teacher?
A teacher, yeah. And it was one of the careers advisors. So I remember going into the room kind of like, oh, what do you want to do sort of thing? I said, oh, well, I'm gaining experience collecting fossils and wanted to learn about dinosaurs and things. They said, well, stop that nonsense and go and get a real job.
Well, it didn't discourage you. Your passion for the subject clearly ran very deep. Do you remember what first sparked your interest?
I can't quite put my finger on that one key thing, but as far back as I can remember, I've had that love of natural history, fossils, dinosaurs, kind of watching TV documentaries, movies, things like Jurassic Park, you might imagine, but also like Land Before Time, which probably hits some nostalgia.
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Chapter 2: How did Dean Lomax overcome early academic setbacks?
Absolutely. Yeah. So they were all predators and some of them evolved within their respective environments. They were kind of top of the food chain, hunting pretty much everything you can imagine. We've even had direct evidence from some of them where you have their last meals preserved of, say, fish and squid.
But there's a few that have marine reptiles preserved in their stomach and hatchling turtles. And one of them even contained a bird. Goodness me.
Well, we're going to talk about them a bit later on. But let's get back to you, Dean. You were born in 1989 in Doncaster. Tell me about your family. I gather they were very supportive of your fascination with fossils.
They were, yeah. My mum and my dad were really supportive. I have an older brother and sister, Scott and Julie. And at a point during my, I guess, early teen years or a little bit before that, my parents split up. And so I lived in a one-parent household for a number of years where... We'd struggle to pay the rent, but Mum always did her best to provide for us.
And she made sure that we had a wonderful, wonderful childhood. But yeah, growing up in Balby in Doncaster was quite difficult as well. It was quite a tough environment. It's certainly one of the most socioeconomically deprived areas in the UK and especially where I grew up.
So what was your experience growing up there?
To be blunt, it was a very rough area to grow up in, to the point, Jim, where even if you were walking to school or walking back from school, there'd always be a little bit of a fear that you might get jumped or something like that walking to school. And it was literally like that. There were occasionally people turning up in school with knives and things like that. So it was quite difficult.
I always say like I had a good close knit community of friends. But yeah, there was always that in the back of your mind. I mean, the school that I went to eventually was closed down as well. But I also am very proud to come from that area.
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Chapter 3: What inspired Dean to pursue paleontology despite discouragement?
And I have lots of fond memories as well.
Well, let's talk about your school days, because I mean, some people are going to find it hard to believe, given what you've achieved. But academic life didn't come easy, did it?
No, we didn't. No, we didn't. And although I always tried my best in school, I was very, very average. And a lot of lessons could end up being disruptive. And sometimes, as we touched upon before, some teachers, not all teachers, but some of the teachers wouldn't be so supportive as well. I mean, one or two of them had even said, you'll never be a paleontologist.
And that was at about the age of 13 or 14.
Well, despite your dedication to fossils, Dean, you didn't get the GCSEs that you wanted, which meant you couldn't take the science subjects at A-level.
Yeah, and that was a real problem. So at that point, in some respect, my kind of dream of becoming a paleontologist started to fall away from me. But it was kind of the last few weeks in school. And I was put into one of the classes where it was kind of not the naughty children, but basically the children who the school didn't know what to do with. And I had this supply teacher come in.
I've kept in touch, actually. His name was Mr. Bonacorsi, Renato Bonacorsi. And he was going around the class saying, what do you want to do?
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Chapter 4: What significant discovery did Dean make during his trip to America?
And he came to me and I said, I want to be a paleontologist. And he said, well, where's the best place in the world for this? So I said, in America. You know, American Midwest is kind of dinosaur country. There's lots of dinosaurs found out there. And so, long story short, I put together with the help of Mr. Bonacorsi a letter and just reached out to one of the places in America.
And as a result, I was offered a place to go and volunteer at a museum in America, the Wyoming Dinosaur Center, for almost four months. And they did say, we'll put you up in what they had, like an intern volunteer house. But I needed the money to get there. So I ended up selling a bunch of my possessions. And that included my beloved Star Wars collection and other things to fund that trip.
So in the summer of 2008, you travelled to America as an 18-year-old for a four-month dig with the Wyoming Dinosaur Centre. And when you got to the dig site, right away, on day one, you struck lucky and found something.
Yeah, that's exactly it. So we were shown a whole load of different dig sites, and they took me to one where they'd been excavating, I think, for about a month or two before I was there.
Chapter 5: How did Dean's first scientific paper change his career trajectory?
And probably within the space of half an hour, I'd uncovered quite a large bone. And so I had one of the other paleontologists come and take a look at it. And we continued to excavate it over the coming days. And it was a huge femur of a sauropod dinosaur, one of those long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs, something like a Diplodocus.
And immediately for me, it's giving me goosebumps now thinking about that. I remember having goosebumps back then and being like, wow, this is incredible.
And it even got some media interest for you, didn't it?
It did, yeah. So the local Doncaster Free Press covered my journey and that was my first introduction to public outreach and they were really supportive. Fantastic.
Well, once you got home from this summer adventure, you started volunteering at a museum in Doncaster.
Yes.
Yeah, so as a child, I went to my local museum that was then called Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery. And I went for many, many years. We'd go on school trips. My mum and dad would take me there. My nana would take me there. And I remember just before going out to Wyoming, I actually went for one last trip walking around there. And they never had...
any fossils on display, except they had a woolly mammoth tooth and a woolly rhino tooth. And I noticed that they'd got them mistakenly identified. And so I actually left a note at the reception saying, hey, you know, your woolly mammoth tooth is actually a woolly rhino tooth, blah, blah, blah, label for it. And they're like, yeah, yeah, sure. Anyway, I was right.
And I had an email from the curator of archaeology there, a chap called Peter Robinson. He said, oh, your trip to Wyoming sounds fascinating. When you come back, come and meet me. So I did. And then we got talking about maybe some volunteering opportunities. And he just happened to say to me, we actually do have a few fossils in the collection. I said, oh, brilliant.
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Chapter 6: What is the story behind the Rutland Sea Dragon discovery?
They thought it was a plaster cast of an ichthyosaur. And so I'm staring at it, and I'm thinking... Hmm. If that's a plaster cast, then it's a very good plaster cast. I said, I'm confident this is real. It even had like a dark mass between its ribs. And I said, oh, maybe that's its stomach contents. Anyway, I was right. And that was a real specimen.
It is quite remarkable, isn't it? You're nothing more than a teenage enthusiast, right? And you're telling these people at the museum, you have a real fossil here. Incredible. Well, at that point, Dean, you reached out to the experts you'd met at your Wyoming trip for advice on how to write this up as a scientific paper.
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 funny thing that I was teased over the summer.
Chapter 7: How does Dean engage with young people to inspire them in science?
Yeah. Well, by this point, you must have figured out that a scientific paper is not a newspaper. And this was, in fact, published in 2010. What did you make of that process? All scientists have to publish their research in journals. That's something we have to do. But you hadn't particularly enjoyed school. So was this sort of academic work more fun for you?
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 kind of 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. And it was published in a journal in New York.
And the cherry on the icing of this remarkable story is that this fossil turned out to be a previously unknown species of ichthyosaur. So a few years later, you actually got to name it.
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So the fact that it went from being thought to be a replica, being actively used in the education department, to then becoming the holotype, so the founding specimen of a new species, is quite remarkable. And so I actually teamed up with Professor Judy Masserey
who has been such an incredible supporter of my career over the years, and we named it as a new species to science. We called it Ichthyosaurus aningae in honour of the wonderful pioneering paleontologist Mary Anning, who is somebody I'd read so much about as a child, and she was a real hero of mine.
So there you were, volunteering at the museum, your first publication under your belt, and you decided the next logical step was to write a book. Fossils of the Whitby Coast was published in 2011. How did that happen?
As a youngster growing up in Doncaster, many of our family trips ended up going to the Yorkshire coastline. And so I'd say, hey, could we go collecting fossils in Whitby? And you'd find ammonites and belemnites, these squid-like creatures. If you were lucky, you'd find ichthyosaur bones and plesiosaur bones and things. And... I always struggled trying to identify my finds.
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