In short
Dean Lomax’s unconventional path to becoming a leading ichthyosaur expert, plus his major fossil discoveries and what they reveal about prehistoric marine reptiles (including predator behavior and possible “silent swimming” adaptations). He also discusses outreach, writing, broadcasting, and advice to aspiring scientists.
Guest background
Dr Dean Lomax (born 1989, Doncaster). Failed GCSE/A-level science; sold his Star Wars collection at 18 to fund a fossil dig in the US (Wyoming Dinosaur Center). Volunteered at Doncaster Museum, published first paper in 2010, later earned an MSc and PhD at the University of Manchester (PhD in 2019) without an undergraduate degree.
Key claims
Ichthyosaurs were top predators; some fossils preserve “last meals.” A Nature paper reports unprecedented soft tissues suggesting stealth-like, low-noise swimming.
Notable examples
“Rutland sea dragon” (10m, found 2021); ichthyosaur holotype from Doncaster museum (new species, Ichthyosaurus anningi); carboniferous plant site near Doncaster (310m years); giant ichthyosaurs “Ichthyotitan” (2024, ~26m) and possible 30–40m fragments.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOOvercoming Doubts and Discovering Passion
0:00 to 0:57
Hear how Dean overcame discouragement to follow his passion for paleontology.
“This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.”
Overcoming Doubts and Discovering Passion
2:24 to 4:28
Hear how Dean overcame discouragement to follow his passion for paleontology.
“So, as a youngster, you had to get past some really disheartening advice from your elders and supposedly betters.”
The Journey to America and First Discoveries
4:28 to 7:30
Dean shares his pivotal journey to America and his first significant fossil find.
“I gather they were very supportive of your fascination with fossils.”
Volunteering and Finding Real Fossils
7:30 to 9:29
Discover how Dean's volunteering led to finding a real ichthyosaur fossil.
“Yeah, so as a child, I went to my local museum that was then called Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery.”
Publishing the First Scientific Paper
9:29 to 11:46
Learn how Dean wrote and published his first scientific paper on a new species.
“You're nothing more than a teenage enthusiast, right?”
Writing a Field Guide at a Young Age
11:46 to 12:53
Dean discusses the publication of his book on fossils at just 21.
“We called it Ichthyosaurus aninge 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.”
Navigating Challenges in Paleontology
12:53 to 13:54
Hear about the challenges Dean faced in his early career and how he persevered.
“I mean, look, let's take stock then, Dean Lomax, because, as you say, you're just 21, already a published author, but with no formal qualifications and still volunteering at the local museum.”
Discovering Fossils in Doncaster
14:00 to 16:46
Learn about Dean's fossil discoveries in Doncaster and their significance.
“Yeah, all these remains are already fossils under the feet of dinosaurs.”
Academic Achievements and Personal Loss
16:46 to 18:51
Hear about Dean's academic journey, achievements, and a personal loss.
“Certainly your mum must have been incredibly proud because she was around to see you get your PhD.”
Writing for the Public
18:51 to 19:41
Discover Dean's approach to writing popular science books for a general audience.
“Dean, let's talk about your broadcasting work.”
Show all 14 chapters
Broadcasting and Reaching Wider Audiences
19:41 to 22:22
Explore Dean's experiences in broadcasting and how it enhances public interest in paleontology.
“Of course, a huge part of your career has been fieldwork, doing the actual science.”
Remarkable Discoveries of Ichthyosaurs
22:22 to 24:28
Learn about Dean's significant discoveries related to giant ichthyosaurs.
“about perhaps your most famous discovery the rutland sea dragon what a fantastic name it's one of the most complete large prehistoric marine reptiles ever found in Britain.”
Insights from Ichthyosaur Research
24:28 to 26:13
Understand the implications of the ichthyosaur discoveries and their modern applications.
“The key thing is you're always looking for certain patterns certain structures and if you go to any fossil site it's always important to go armed with a bit of an idea of what you might expect to find.”
Motivating the Next Generation
26:13 to 27:32
Hear Dean's advice for young people pursuing their dreams in science.
“And so there is real possibility that an ichthyosaur of 180 million years ago had already been doing this thing way back then, reducing noise, and you can use that and apply it to modern world.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Dean Lomax:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
0:30Dean Lomax:at Whole Foods Market. Ask yourself, what are your best people spending their time on right now? Expense reports, receipt chasing, month-end close that takes weeks. You become what you spend on, and that's not what you're building toward. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that eliminates that work before it starts. AI agents that handle the manual stuff automatically, so your team can spend their time on what actually compounds. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com slash AF. 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.
1:19Dean Lomax: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.
2:03Dean Lomax: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. Oh, 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?
2:38Dean Lomax:That is true. Teacher or...?
2:40Jim Al-Khalili:A teacher, yeah. Yeah, and it was one of the career's advisors. 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 say, well, stop that nonsense and go and get a real job.
2:53Dean Lomax:Well, it didn't discourage you. Your passion for the subject clearly ran very deep. Do you remember what first sparked your interest?
3:01Jim Al-Khalili: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. But also visiting museums and collecting fossils. and reading books. So there was this kind of a collective thing that just stayed with me.
3:23Dean Lomax:Well, I also mentioned that your particular field of interest is ichthyosaurs. Tell us a bit more about them.
3:29Jim Al-Khalili:Iichthyosaurs are a group of ancient marine reptiles. They sort of look a little bit like dolphins or sharks, but they are reptiles. They're often misidentified as swimming dinosaurs, but they were swimming around in the oceans and the seas whilst dinosaurs were walking on land. They appeared roughly 250 million years ago in what's called the Triassic period. And then they went extinct around about 90 million years ago in the Cretaceous period. But they were a highly successful group of prehistoric animals. And they're genuinely really fascinating to study.
4:01Dean Lomax:Were they quite fierce things?
4:03Jim Al-Khalili:They were, yeah, to a point. 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. and 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.
4:27Dean Lomax: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.
4:39Jim Al-Khalili:They were, yeah. My mum and my dad were really supportive I have an older brother and sister, Scott and Julie. At a point during my, I guess, early teen years, 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.
5:03Dean Lomax: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?
5:12Jim Al-Khalili:No, we didn't. No, we didn't. And although I always tried my best in school, I was very, very average. A lot of lessons could end up being disruptive. And sometimes 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 about the age of 13 or 14.
5:32Dean Lomax: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.
5:41Jim Al-Khalili: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 and i 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 with the help of mr bonacorsi a letter and just reached out to one of your 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.
6:45Dean Lomax: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.
7:00Jim Al-Khalili:Yeah that's exactly it yeah yeah so we were we were shown kind of 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 and probably within the space of half an hour i'd uncovered quite a large bone and so i had one of the 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 net long tailed dinosaurs something like a diplodocus and and immediately for me it gives me goosebumps now thinking about that i remember having goosebumps back then and being like wow you know what this is incredible and it even got some media interest for you didn't it it did yeah yeah so the local uh Doncaster Free Press covered my my journey and that was my first introduction to to kind of public outreach and they were really
7:46Dean Lomax:supportive fantastic well once you got home from this summer adventure you started volunteering at a museum in Doncaster?
7:55Jim Al-Khalili: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 gone 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 your woolly rhino tooth blah blah label for it and they're like yeah yeah sure it is anyway I was right and I had an email from the uh 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 but as it turns out that few fossils was somewhere in the region of about 10 000 jip and on my first day peter and another chap called alan they took me kind of behind the scenes show me the fossils and they showed me this one specimen and it was about a meter and a half long that they thought was a replica of an ichthyosaur well just a plaster cast yeah exactly yeah 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 that it's a very good plastic cast.
9:20Jim Al-Khalili: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.
9:31Dean Lomax:It is quite remarkable, isn't it? It is, the serendipity. You're nothing more than a teenage enthusiast, right? To be fair. And you're telling these people at the museum, you have a real fossil here. Yeah, yeah. 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.
9:52Jim Al-Khalili: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. 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 And I always tease that over the summer.
10:14Dean Lomax: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?
10:35Jim Al-Khalili:No, not at all. Initially, it wasn't because I'd 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 happen to be working with two marine reptile experts who work on ichthyosaurs, Professor Judy Messera 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.
11:12Jim Al-Khalili:And it was published in a journal in New York.
11:14Dean Lomax: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.
11:25Jim Al-Khalili:Yeah, absolutely. 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 Messere, who has been such an incredible support of my career over the years. And we named it as a new species to science. We called it Ichthyosaurus aninge 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.
11:56Dean Lomax: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
12:13Jim Al-Khalili:doncaster many of our family trips ended up going to the yorkshire coastline and so i say hey could we go collecting fossils in whitby and you'd find ammonites and balamnites these squid-like creatures if you were lucky you'd find ichthyosaur bones and pleziosaur bones and things and i always struggled trying to identify my finds and so as i got a little bit older after i'd published my first paper and started to get a little bit more confidence in my abilities, I said, well, maybe an idea for a book, a field guide to identify fossils from the Whitby coast and happened to find this brilliant publisher who loved the idea.
12:44Jim Al-Khalili:And then this book was published, I was 21. And so I'd gone then within the space of a few years of just leaving school to discovering these fossils, being on this dig and then writing a book.
12:53Dean Lomax:I mean, look, let's take stock then, Dean Lomax, because, as you say, you're just 21, already a published author, but with no formal qualifications and still volunteering at the local museum. I mean, you still had to earn a living.
13:07Jim Al-Khalili:Yeah, absolutely that. And so I'd continue to work in several jobs as a barman, working in delivery, earning as much money as possible. So I could then continue volunteering at Doncaster Museum. But I kept seeing that kind of bigger picture aspect. And I mean, I even remember, Jim, at one point, my mum 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.
13:41Jim Al-Khalili:Well, you didn't have a plan B. No, I didn't, that's it, yeah.
13:45Dean Lomax:But you obviously had a real belief in yourself and where you wanted to go, but it was clearly a hard slog. Did you ever get disheartened?
13:53Jim Al-Khalili: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 well then not long after
14:09Dean Lomax:your first book was published you made another astonishing find your life story is about lots of astonishing finds um this was an important carboniferous fossil site in your hometown
14:21Jim Al-Khalili:town yes 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 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 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 and i said we're not going to find anything there within the space of about five minutes we found about 10 different fossil plants and yeah and we were like oh my goodness you know maybe this is it we've hit carbon versus gold we ended up finding somewhere in the region about 30 different types of fossil plants some probably new to science found remains of horseshoe crabs i found an actual fossil shark egg case in Doncaster and I ended up writing up this material in a scientific journal and we went from finding the site collecting hundreds of specimens to describing it and then that material going on display at the museum so kind of leaving a nice mini local legacy there for for that material and museum must have been pleased oh they were so incredibly pleased yeah and we and we got some really great PR too one of the headlines was something like jaws in Doncaster because of the
Read the full transcript
15:43Dean Lomax:The carboniferous period we're talking about, and this is long before the age of dinosaurs, over 300 million years ago, right?
15:49Jim Al-Khalili:Yeah, all these remains are already fossils under the feet of dinosaurs. So they are roughly about 310 million years old. The dinosaurs are still another good chunk of time to come.
15:58Dean Lomax:Wow. Well, this success then also helped kick off your relationship with the University of Manchester, where you were invited to become an honorary research fellow.
16:08Jim Al-Khalili:Yeah, and this was through two colleagues there who I'd kind of been in contact with through various different projects. And they basically said, look, you've been doing some exceptional work. We can look at getting you affiliated with the University of Manchester. So they got me involved there. And right off the bat, they said there's also the prospect of doing a master's degree without having done an undergrad. And they said it's quite rare, but we're willing to support you. And so I ended up doing a master's in paleontology and then subsequently did my PhD without ever doing an undergraduate degree.
16:38Dean Lomax:That is quite incredible. So you completed your PhD at Manchester. This is in 2019. And that must have been a huge moment for you. Certainly your mum must have been incredibly proud because she was around to see you get your PhD. But sadly, she died the following year.
16:56Jim Al-Khalili:She did. Yeah. And I always find it tough to talk about mum as well. She was an incredible person. And throughout my life, she's just been so supportive and sacrificed so much for me and my brother and sister and such a huge influence on me and such a massive supporter.
17:15Dean Lomax:Well, Dean, during your time at Manchester, you continued to write books, notably a massive project called Dinosaurs of the British Isles, which I gather took about four years to compile.
17:27Jim Al-Khalili:Yeah, it was about four years to do that, and it was a massive challenge. When I eventually submitted the final manuscript, I feel like I think I probably was burnt out and passed out for a week, if I remember rightly, but it was a book that was done to kind of bridge the gap between academia and the general public. So it wasn't an academic textbook, but more of like that general public kind of book.
17:47Dean Lomax:You've also written various books since then. I want to take us on a quick tangent here. Your most recent book, The Secret Lives of Dinosaurs, was published last year and featured an endorsement from Slash, the guitarist from the rock group Guns N' Roses. How did that happen?
18:06Jim Al-Khalili:So Slash and I have corresponded for probably four or five years over social media. He's a huge fan of dinosaurs and paleontology. So, yeah, he and I had exchanged a bunch of messages and I just so happened to say, you know, we're looking for people to endorse the book. And he said, yeah, send it to me. And he actually read that last year whilst on tour with Guns N' Roses. Incredible. I remember him saying it and it made me laugh because I was thinking between sets of something, he's playing Sweet Child of Mine and then reading about dinosaur mating.
18:38Dean Lomax:What are the chances of a joint project in the future? Some sort of rock and roll dinosaur book maybe?
18:43Jim Al-Khalili:Yeah, funny you say that. Yeah, we have actually had that discussion about doing something along those lines. Maybe something in the book or TV side of things. Yeah, I'd love to. I absolutely love to.
18:52Dean Lomax:Dean, let's talk about your broadcasting work. In 2015, you got your first big presenter gig on the ITV documentary Dinosaur Britain, for which you were also the scientific advisor. How did you enjoy that experience?
19:06Jim Al-Khalili:I really enjoyed it. And it's something, working as a broadcaster, is something I never thought I would do. But I was working with the wonderful Ellie Harrison, who was the presenter and me as the co-host, kind of going around Britain and meeting paleontologists and me kind of showing her some incredible fossils found in Britain. And I had such a wonderful time doing it. And I think the bigger picture for me is that you can reach such a massive, much broader audience. And if you can communicate it in such a fun and engaging way, you can then supercharge people's passions for something like paleontology.
19:40Jim Al-Khalili:Absolutely.
19:41Dean Lomax:Of course, a huge part of your career has been fieldwork, doing the actual science. We've already touched on a couple of your discoveries, but I want to hear about a few more. In 2016, you got word that something special might have been discovered on the Somerset coast.
19:58Jim Al-Khalili:Yeah, so a really good friend of mine and fossil collector called Paul de la Salle, he had snapped a few photographs of a portion of giant jawbone that he'd found on the Somerset coast and he'd sent them to me and immediately my jawbone would hit the floor because I remember thinking, wow, this thing's enormous. And he'd only found fragments of it but it was a giant chunk, It's about a metre long chunk of jaw bone of a bone called the serangula, which is part of the lower jaw, of a giant ichthyosaur. Now, this was just probably about 25 % of the actual completeness of the actual full bone. And altogether, just like scaling that up, the animal it belonged to would have been about 25 metres long.
20:36Jim Al-Khalili:So you're talking like a blue whale sized ichthyosaur, absolutely enormous. Incredible.
20:41Dean Lomax:And that's not even the end of the story, is it? because a few years later you got word that another gigantic jawbone had been found again down on the Somerset coast.
20:51Jim Al-Khalili:Clearly these giants were like buses you know you wait wait and then two come along. Not quite at once but just a couple years later a father and daughter fossil hunting pair Justin and Ruby Reynolds and Ruby I should say as well she was only 11 years old at the time and she and her dad found some more fragments of what turned out to be yet another giant serangular bone this time much more complete but showing exactly the same features as paul's this time we had two specimens from a very rare geological unit in the time called the lake triassic about 205 ish million years old and so this time i invited paul justin and ruby and other people to be part of my team and we described them as a new gigantic ichthyosaur that we named ichthyotitan in 2024 and this beastie was genuinely a titan you're you're looking at easily 26 meters long animal i mean so it's really a contender for the largest animal yeah that ever lived absolutely yeah it's up there as a contender and we included some other giant fragments in there that may even belong to something in the 30 40 meter range and we're hoping for you know for more material like
21:58Dean Lomax:that to come forward in the future i gather there's even a documentary film in the works isn't
22:02Jim Al-Khalili:there there is yeah so so justin and ruby actually joined me on a a major expedition they came out with their family to british columbia in canada to film for uh this big documentary an imax film that's coming out uh even later this year early next year and that's kind of all focused around ichthyotitan and giant ichthyosaurs but there are some new discoveries on the horizon let's talk
22:23Dean Lomax:about perhaps your most famous discovery the rutland sea dragon what a fantastic name it's one of the most complete large prehistoric marine reptiles ever found in Britain.
22:34Jim Al-Khalili:Yeah it is massive and this thing it was found in January 2021 by a chap called Joe Davis. He works for the Rutland Water Nature Reserve and he was fixing one of the lagoons. They've got a whole bunch of pipes on the lagoons and they literally like pulled the plug on the lagoon, lowered the water levels and whilst him and another colleague Paul were walking along they just happened to spot this string of vertebrae and he said oh I wonder what that is and he snapped some pictures and Paul said no no it's an old pipe that leave it it's nothing and he still teases him to this day but a day later i received the photos of them and i said whoa that's an ichthyosaur now of course we didn't know how complete was going to be i led an excavation in the summer of 2021 and we had the entire animal from the very tip of the snout to the end of the tail 10 meter long early jurassic giant it's the most complete prehistoric reptile ever found in britain but also the most complete of that time interval around the world of roughly 180 million years ago.
23:29Jim Al-Khalili:And in fact, you've brought a piece of it with you today. I have indeed, yeah. Let me carefully unwrap this. So this is a dorsal vertebra, and it's one of the largest. So this is about 12, 13 centimetres wide. And this is one of the real specimens. Jim, I'll pass that to you.
23:45Dean Lomax:Yeah, it's difficult to do this on radio, but it's very heavy. I mean, it weighs probably about a kilo or so, something like that. Yeah, yeah, about that.
23:53Jim Al-Khalili:Yeah, and that's a good indicator as well, because when we excavated the skeleton, the skull block alone weighed over a tonne. Like, it was super heavy to get out of the ground. And you imagine, so this is one of the largest of the ichthyosaurs vertebrae, but they had upwards of 150 plus vertebrae. Some of them the size of pennies, but this is definitely the largest. This is bigger than the palm of my hand, and it's just one of the vertebrae.
24:14Dean Lomax:I better pass it back to you very carefully. Thank you. I mean just so that people don't get overexcited by any old odd shaped rock or an old pipe what should we be looking for if we're on the hunt for genuine prehistoric fossils?
24:30Jim Al-Khalili:It always varies from site to site. The key thing is you're always looking for certain patterns certain structures and if you go to any fossil site it's always important to go armed with a bit of an idea of what you might expect to find. So if you look through a book or you look online images of stuff like that that gets your eyes into it there's one final discovery i'd like to
24:51Dean Lomax:mention dean that you published in the journal nature last year this was an unprecedented finding of the first soft tissues of a large ichthyosaur which revealed some rather special
25:01Jim Al-Khalili:features yeah this is a spectacular fossil that the private collector brought to my attention and it's a giant flipper of an ichthyosaur where basically there's all these finger bones that you can see and then for about 30 40 percent of the rest of this flipper is all just soft tissues and it's almost like a wing of a plane or if you think like a wing of an owl and preserved in there were all these like really strange banding structures and then we had these things that looked a little bit like spikes along the trailing edge but they're not spikes there were these really unusual structures that we term chondroderms and collectively all these different features reveal that this ichthyosaur had developed silent swimming like stealth and it's a little bit like if you think of owls where they're flying at night they've got silent flight where they'll reduce that noise and they'll snatch away their prey like mice and things it's the same sort of thing that we had with these these ichthyosaurs when they're hunting in the dark murky conditions and this is the sort
25:54Dean Lomax:of thing that has huge potential in the field of biomimicry that you know we see how nature's evolved these clever tricks and we try and copy them might these ichthyosaur traits have some use in modern design?
26:07Jim Al-Khalili:Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So we thought about that as well, that potentially you might be able to replicate these structures and put them on things, say, like wind turbines to reduce noise from wind turbines. And so there is real possibility that an ichthyosaur of 180 million years ago had already been doing this thing way back then, reducing noise, and you can use that and apply it to modern world.
26:27Dean Lomax:Well, Dean, your fieldwork continues, as does your outreach work. Now, a big part of your outreach you do with schools, getting the message across to kids that they can achieve their dreams. What advice do you give them for doing that?
26:42Jim Al-Khalili:Because my story is really so unconventional, it's kind of a case of like, you can do this as well. And I always say that having your passion and being persistent and having patience is really, really significant, clearly all the three Ps. And it's not just necessarily for children, but I guess anybody listening to this who wants to get into paleontology or the sciences it's a case of like you gaining as much experience as possible but also be willing to to take some risks really put yourself out there like I did when I first went out to Wyoming but also you've got to have fun and being that kind of person who was told no you're not good enough I think it's so significant for somebody like me to just say I've just got to go out there and do it.
27:23Dean Lomax:And having fun as you say is very important because I've certainly had fun chatting to you. Dean Lomax, thank you very much for sharing your life scientific. My great pleasure.
27:35Dean Lomax:Hi, I'm Simon Jack. I'm Zing Zing. And together we host Good Bad Billionaire. The podcast exploring how some of the wealthiest people on the planet made their money. And we are back with a new season. From sporting superstars to music moguls and celebrity CEOs. We'll be taking a closer look at the lives and fortunes of some of the world's richest people. and asking you to decide if they're good, bad or just another billionaire. Good, bad, billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now or search for Good, Bad, Billionaire wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
28:09Dean Lomax:He's widely recognised as one of the greatest footballers in history. He's won the prestigious Ballon d 'Or Award five times. He's the all-time leading goalscorer in professional football. And according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, he's the first active footballer in history to achieve billionaire status. Guess who we're talking about yet? That's right. Good Bad Billionaire is exploring the life and fortune of football icon Cristiano Ronaldo. That's Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
From the publisher
Have you ever been told you aren't good enough to do something, then gone ahead and proved the naysayers wrong by doing it anyway - in glorious, headline-grabbing style?
That is the satisfying story of Dr Dean Lomax. Dean grew up in Doncaster with a passion for fossils but after failing various school exams, was told by teachers that he'd never make it as a palaeontologist. Undeterred by leaving school with no qualifications, Dean sold his childhood Star Wars collection to fund a fossil-hunting trip to America that changed his life - after which a chance discovery led to him publishing his first ever scientific paper at the age of just 20.
Today, he’s an expert on ichthyosaurs - the massive marine reptiles that once inhabited our seas - and has discovered and named several new species, written books for both adults and children, and brought the prehistoric world to life on TV. Talking to Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Dean discusses dinosaurs as a 'gateway science', discovering the Rutland Sea Dragon and the importance of cutting out noise from nay-sayers to follow your dreams...