662 - DR DEAN LOMAX - Britain’s TOP Dinosaur Expert Reveals Insane Prehistoric Secrets! (2 Hour Special)

35:18If it was in English, I'd be writing a short story about dinosaurs. It was all like living and breathing there. And you'd think kind of I'd be more into science, like science would have been the lesson for me. But the one time that we had a lesson, at least in secondary school, that we had a lesson on fossils, The teacher, the previous lesson, he ended it, and he's like, so, yeah, tomorrow class we're talking about a really boring subject, fossils. And I was like, what? Are you joking me? So I took advantage of it and brought some fossils in to talk about them. Oh, wow, you took the class? Yeah, literally, yeah, literally.

35:51And I was like, holy shit, the science teacher is saying this is boring. What are you talking about? This is one of the coolest things ever. So, yeah, it was wild. You said that you would correct your brother and sister on the pronunciation of dinosaurs. Yeah. What would you do? Because how old are you, if you don't mind me asking? I'm 36. 36. So you're a similar age to us. We're 33, 32. How would you know the pronunciations? Would it be from watching TV? Because YouTube, I guess, weren't a big thing. Yeah, it was not a thing then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it would be watching documentaries, or then sometimes you'd have the phonetic spelling in a in a book but then it's funny when you as you've gotten older you also realize that a lot of it is like bs as well so like you might be familiar with like the dinosaur diplodocus yeah i know growing up i'd say diplodocus yeah but then when i speak to i spent so much time now i work in america and it's american dinosaur you speak to americans and it's like no no the the correct pronunciation is diplodocus not diplodocus but growing up it was always diplodocus to me well i think what would i have said because i remember fia and i having this i think as kids we would have always said Diplodocus.

36:58And you're saying it's what, sorry? Diplodocus. Yeah, Diplodocus, yeah. Well, I'm going to put you on the spot here. Yeah, let's do it. I've got some, I basically just asked ChatGPT to give me some of the hardest dinosaurs to pronounce. And it's given me seven ear. And I was wondering if you could give it a bash. Do you reckon there'll be some you don't know or should you know them really? Chances are there's probably some I don't know. And that's one of the cool things about paleontology. Like with all the events and outreach that I do, and that could be speaking to groups of say 50, but the biggest audience that I've spoken to kind of live is like 3 ,000 plus people.

37:31And you always get that opportunity where somebody's going to ask you a question. You're like, yeah, I don't know. And it's good, especially if it's a kid because for children who are really inspired by this stuff, if they're like, yeah, Dr. Lomax didn't know this answer. It's good because they feel like they're on the same page. And I love that sort of thing because you're always learning in science. Right, right. There's a good chance that I don't know some of this stuff. No, but this is what I like as well. Like not to make the conversation too heavy, but personally I'm an atheist right so so I I I love science I love that scientists are often going oh we taught this for years and now we know that this is wrong rather than scrambling around for a fake answer so right so so we've got uh seven here so um ignore the numbers but this is the first one so what would this be all right let's see what's gonna make it up stay with conviction all right so the first one that's uh I've never heard of that okay it's not even real Oh, to be fair.

38:23I double-checked them on the way here. They're all real. All right, so I would call that, I'd pronounce that as Hugh Hugh Canothelus. That's what I would say. Okay. All right. Okay. And this is the phonetic. Yeah, that's bullshit. No, no. I don't buy that. So the phonetic says it's Wewe Canothelus. But you've never heard of this? I've never heard of that. Okay, right. Have you heard of any of these? Oh, I'm even a paleontologist now. I don't know if I've... Yeah, yeah. the rest of them apart from one more yeah okay that one i haven't heard of so yeah right okay probably somebody gonna watch this listen to this and be like how did you not know that so this one next one so that i would say is pachycephalosaurus okay and you've heard of that one yep what does that one look like so that's one of the the most famous ones where you've got this really big kind of uh cranium you've got this big um you the most famous kind of way of explaining that is like these are the ones like the head banging head oh the head Yeah, those sort of things.

39:19You see them in like the Jurassic Park Lost World where you've got them butting heads and stuff. So they're quite a famous North American dinosaur, Pachycephalus. Oh, cool. But it's one of the interesting things that are primarily just known from what we call like the dome. And it's like a massive, I think it's up to like several inches of just thick bone. And that was the idea that they were bashing heads or like banging into each other. What's the benefit of that? Why are they evolved to go and let's just head butt? It's bizarre, isn't it? And the kind of understanding of that is a bit like if you imagine kind of like rams, bighorn sheep, butting heads.

39:51It's that sort of thing. So it's like a dominance and it's kind of probably for like sexual display, courtship, like I'm a stronger kind of suit to this one and I'm going to beat this other one up and I'm going to show I'm stronger than that. Yeah, alpha kind of thing. And the female generally would probably go for the stronger one. Because like all animals, they all, they evolve and have these different sort of like defense mechanisms and attack. A bit like Pokemon really. Yeah, absolutely. I know we're geeking out over Pokemon earlier. With the T-Rex, why do they have them little arms? That seems pointless.

40:25It's so weird, right? And that's one of the things that has puzzled paleontologists for so long. And there's been multiple different kind of theories that have come forward. And one of the kind of leading theories, I'll give you two. So two of the kind of main theories behind it is that one, which I'm probably, it's probably a combination of these things, but one of them is that if you imagine T-Rex which has got such a massive kind of banana-sized teeth this enormous kind of one plus meter long skull bone crunching jaws like such a powerful bite kind of I think it's like 10 times or whatever strength of a saltwater crocodile bite like absolutely powerful wow if you imagine that attacking something like a triceratops with its jaws the idea is that it could get its jaws around say the back of the back of the neck behind the frill of a triceratops and And the arms are kind of short enough that they could still slash with those claws.

41:14So they're in really close. Imagine close combat. So although they don't look like much, they were still pretty strong arms. And that's one idea, is that up close, kind of close combat, slashing as it's biting with the jaws. The other one, a bit like with the kind of headbutton of Pachycephalosaurus, is more along the lines of some sort of sexual display as well. Or even during mating, maybe it was like stroking the female. legitimately that's one theory really yeah that's one theory that wow is there no chance that when they found the t-rex bones there was also another dead dinosaur next to it and they've mixed the arms up like how in your museum where they got the wrong ones the wrong way around so that's different dinosaur arms good question stevie so that that was actually something that i remember way back when when it when it was originally found and kind of over obviously long before my time but when it was originally found and other individuals have been found later when they found the arms of T-rays.

42:08They were a bit like, well, hang on a minute. It's just taking the piss here. Why have you got this giant animal, you know, big meat-eating theropods, 10, 12, 30-meter long animal, and it's got these puny arms. But that was one idea. But yeah, we found too many now that have got their arms. They're just confirmed at free. Oh yeah, confirmed, yeah. You know how chickens have tiny little wings? Yeah. Could they not have had wings there? So not necessarily like proper wings that we see in chickens, but there's a good idea that it's so bizarre in our nowadays that to even think like this but within the last 20-30 years we've had so many sort of extraordinary finds of dinosaurs with either soft tissues preserved or even with feathers and one of the oldest tyrannosaurs so not quite the immediate kind of ancestor to t-rex but one of them that lived way way before t-rex roughly 125 million years ago that which is already a fossil under the feet of t-rex which is wild but that animal was absolutely covered in feathers so there's a good chance that T-Rex would have had some sort of feathery covering so perhaps we don't know for sure and we don't know if we'll ever find feathers in T-Rex but maybe it could have had some sort of feathers or something on its arms which again would feed into the sexual kind of display Wow, we're going to touch on that a little bit later on about how they looked Let's just rattle through these pronunciations so we've got this one here, what's this?

43:24That I would go with Zhongguanlong Zhongguanlong, okay can we see the phonetic fee? Yep, pretty much bang on, this little one Yeah, this is great. This is the shortest name for a dinosaur as well. This is called Yiqui. Yiqui, and that's Y-I-Q-I. And then that looks like Pistachiosaurus, that one. Yeah, so I actually talk about that in the Secret Lives of Dinosaurs as well. So I actually nickname it Pistachiosaurus.

43:52And Taco as well. So it's called Psittacosaurus. And weirdly enough, that ended up, at least the babies of it, ended up inside an early mammal. So we know that an early mammal, which was about the size of a badger, was eating baby Psittacosaurus. I like to call them like tacos as well. I like Psittacosaurus. But yeah, pretty cool. And they're a little Ceratopsian dinosaur. So related to things like Triceratops, but they live quite a bit earlier, about the size of a Labrador. Wow. Wow. I just imagine all dinosaurs are massive. Yeah. That's one of the things as well. Yeah. And it's so easy to kind of think like that.

44:23And there's so many that were tiny, like kind of like even squirrel sized. And that's a, yeah. Do the tiny ones not preserve as well? Oh yeah, great question. Yeah, in some environments they don't. So a lot of the excavations I've been on, typically you might find like the really big ones, because you've got giant bones, there's a good chance that they will preserve really quite well. But the small ones, often the bones are so fragile, they'll be broken apart and lost. But depending on the environment, like Psittacosaurus and Yikui in particular, Yiku is only a bit longer than a squirrel. That was found in this incredible area in Lyoning in China, where you have often like soft tissue preservation.

44:58and that was kind of the way they were preserved is kind of when they died they were kind of intermingled with like volcanic ash and things that helped to preserve them really well a little bit like pompeii kind of thing but not quite that but what what would you say was the smallest dinosaurs so the smallest dinosaurs so there are a few that have been named one of the smallest would be a dinosaur called like a bird-like dinosaur called ankyornis and you're talking about the size of like a squirrel and there's a few that have been been described here there and everybody in fact i named one that was about a little bit longer than a squirrel but a longer tail a thing called hesperonothoides and it's a little velociraptor like dinosaur but yeah no no larger than a squirrel about about that wow and uh and that was we found but that was found before my time in wyoming but when i volunteered in wyoming uh the first time which is 18 years ago now in 2008 which i know we'll probably chat about that but but yeah that was a specimen he showed me it was like a draw was pulled out one of my now good friends said hey this is a new dinosaur i was like is it that's cool and i you know i had no idea what to do about that but years later i'd be part of the team who named that that's so cool this might be a stupid question but when i love them like you've just said it was like a small velociraptor basically how do you know it's not just a small velociraptor or a baby velociraptor how do you know it's a different species yes no stupid questions in paleo and science stevie um this one that's a really good question and so the way in which you can look at that so where the time in which hesperon if Thoides was alive.

46:23It was a time called the late Jurassic, and it's roughly about 150, 155 million years ago. And that's based on studying the geology and the rocks in which it's found in. Velociraptor lived quite a few million years later in the Cretaceous period. So definitely it wasn't a Velociraptor. There's no way it'd be a Velociraptor. It's also on different continents. So you had Hesperon authorities in North America, Velociraptors in Asia. But also then it's when you kind of get to like the finer, like nerdy details of it. It's kind of like right when you think you found something new you've got to look at like the features the bones in the skull bones in the in the skeleton and compare them to pretty much everything on the family tree including velociraptor and then eventually you'll be like okay clearly it's very different to a velociraptor is it how how can i word this um i might be again this could be actually genuinely stupid but um if you saw um not gonna ask me like lotnesmon does it does it does it live if if you saw the boat the skeletons of every human ever yeah and you you i'm sure if you took like a bit more but like a baby one and then like like like i'm the the tallest man to ever live yeah they're gonna look massively different aren't they yeah but but scientists would still know that that's the same species yeah yeah exactly that and that's because even if you've got a baby and like the oldest individual or a really tall individual the we call it the morphology so the shape of those bones and the structure even though they'll look different in terms of like their density and that they'll still have the same shape overall and they'll still be able to say yeah that's uh that's the same species oh wow it becomes a bit harder when you introduce kind of say uh in in in dogs so you've got so many breeds like look at a chihuahua yeah compared to a great dane yeah if you look at the finer anatomy it's very clear they're still a dog but things have been modified but that's where humans have played kind of you know intervention intervened and kind of modified it so you've got like shorter snouts and a chihuahua and all that right but that becomes a little bit harder but you still have the same anatomy right yeah when you're dealing with fossils and of course it's good to point out too is that you're not always getting a complete picture yeah it's so nice if you go to a museum or if you're in a if you're reading a book and it's like oh yeah beautiful complete skeleton that's usually not how it is usually you've just got fragments of fragments and you're like what the hell is this how are you going to work this out right that makes it yeah what about like so with me i was born with a severe underbite i got it fixed in the nhs um shout out the nhs by the way um but a scientist might look at that and go that's not a human that deserves its own species are there like are there ways in which like you'd get like a t-rex but it might be like like a deformed version of a t-rex yeah yeah yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

49:10And in fact, you do have that. I mean, that's even not to keep plugging the book or whatever. No, go ahead, mate. Yeah, we'll just turn this into a secret. That is a dinosaur's podcast. In that book, I kind of focus on that kind of thing, is where you're looking at, say, dinosaurs that might have pathologies and they might look quite radically different to kind of what's the norm for a skeleton. So we do find those types of things. Oh, right. And sometimes you'll have, like in the case of some dinosaurs, you've got those with broken jaws. and it can kind of like quite dramatically at least in some cases kind of modify the skull shape slightly or say the foot might be really severely injured there's a dinosaur you might have heard like allosaurus you heard allosaurus before yeah yeah so allosaurus another big meat eating dinosaur mostly found in north america late jurassic but also you find them in europe as well a lot rarer but there was a very famous one that i talked about here called Big Al and it was the basis of a BBC doc years ago called, you remember Walking With Dinosaur?

50:07Yeah. That was such a cool, yeah, that was a really influential series. And they did a spinoff called The Ballad of Big Al and that kind of told this story of this allosaurus, how it broke its bones and things. And that's got like massive like bony lesions, it's got like broken ribs, broken vertebrae, broken toes, and that really modifies what you're looking at. So it becomes harder to be like, oh, is that definitely an allosaurus? how do you know if the dinosaur died with these broken bones like injuries like this head button one might have cracked its skull in a head yeah or if the bones just broke over the millions of years like by breaking down yeah yeah so great question so sometimes it's really hard to tell all the times you might have direct evidence in some of these fossil skeletons where you actually have say a broken bone it's rehealed or it's a broken bone and it's not rehealed and that might be a result of say a predator attacking it other times you can tell kind of on say say let's say we had a t-rex t-rex died and over time the geology has kind of affected it and it might be cracks running through it if you have that experience you can tell quite quite well that yeah clearly that's a break due to geology or whatever but it's quite rare generally speaking to find the direct evidence of say pathologies or or in this case you kind of you have evidence of like mating of animals with its last meals preserved all that sort of stuff which is which i find absolutely fascinating because it's like you kind of think like i often gas like this is quite a novel approach to kind of the story of dinosaurs paleontology because you're looking at direct evidence of behaviors and you think how the hell can you get behavior from a rock yeah and it's like you you just have to look at like the the extraordinary evidence that you have of last meals of even some individuals that were pregnant incredible stuff really it tells you so much about these animals in their lives so so if you if you found a bone and it had some healing on it yeah you know then it's got that injury while it was still alive because obviously wouldn't heal after death yeah exactly that so there was one of the most famous which i i it blew my mind when i saw it was a a jurassic crocodile which looks it looked a little bit like a gharial croc so one of those like really not not kind of typical kind of salt water but one of those like fish eating things really long snout very narrow snout this individual had broken its lower jaw and it was preserved and in like a 90 degree downturn jaw like like position but it healed it had this big bony callus so it lived probably for months maybe even years with this weird 90 degree to downturn jaw which is extraordinary and we see that in modern animals like modern crocs and like gharials sometimes they'll have their entire jaws removed and still be able to survive how was that eating that's the thing how the hell was that eating a second ago you said even some you found have been pregnant yeah how is that because there's little bones there as well yeah exactly that yeah and And one of the areas that I work on, like on ichthyosaurs and stuff, which we've touched upon, I know we'll chat a bit more about, like on ichthyosaurs, they're one of the most famous.

52:55There's been more than 100 pregnant individuals found. And most of them come from a place in Germany, which is called Holzmaden, which is quite close to Stuttgart. And that area is famous. It's probably a breeding ground. And it's very famous for extraordinary preservation. In their case, there's one that was found with as many as eight fetuses inside. Oh, my God. And, yeah, it's extraordinary. I mean, one of them is a really tragic scenario, but one of them, and there's probably a couple of others, but one in particular, I remember seeing it. And it's kind of a, I mean, obviously for me, every time you see a fossil for the first time, it's quite a magical kind of thing.

53:28Because it's like, wow, that is a thing that was once living, breathing, right? But this one, it was probably in the process of giving birth and the little one got stuck. And the adult and that individual, and it had another three individuals inside its siblings all perished, which is really sad. But it tells you so much about the behavior of these animals. Are they not egg laying ones? So they weren't. No, and that's another thing. So it was long assumed when ichthyosaurs were first found by Mary Anning and Cade that they were egglings, they're reptiles. They'd come on land, you know, laid their eggs like turtles and pissed off back into the ocean.

53:58That isn't what happened. They gave birth at sea, a bit like you'd think like dolphins today and whales, but they had had as many, at least we know the ones in Germany, like eight fetuses, probably even more, some of them. Wow. Talking of fossils there, I read on your website that when you're in your teens and you wanted to gain more experience and knowledge um that you started visiting museums identifying fossils reading books um or like the the typical way people learn stuff uh however it did say that you attended um fossil related events and i'm intrigued to know as a man who has no skin in the game yeah what the fuck is a fossil related event so so yeah fossil related events and so it was kind of like there there are these kind of shows that in the uk at least and i guess worldwide but for me growing up and as a kind of a 13 14 year old you know teenager wanting to get my kind of foot on the door there's these events where people have like collections or that they've you know maybe a private collector has found stuff on the jurassic coast and down the line regis or along the yorkshire coast so i was brought up collecting obviously in doncaster i used to go to whitby and find fossils and things there what just on the beach yeah just on the beach yeah and they've been eroded from the foreshore and the cliffs and then you'd find evidence of uh of ancient marine reptiles of fossil squids and things like that which used to be pretty cool and so can people still do this now then yeah yeah absolutely yeah yeah yeah i'm hoping off the back of this you two are gonna be like right fuck it i'm gonna go out and go and look for some fossils yeah well that's a video yeah that's a video we'll come and do it with you one day i'd love it yeah absolutely make that happen yeah yeah wow but but as as as more and more people have got into it over the over the years there's only a finite amount of stuff we can find right is that yeah generally speaking yeah so i i think we're never going to run out of fossils they're always going to be there but unless especially in our lifetimes and stuff we're never going to run out of them i mean i guess at one point you're going to talk probably i don't know thousands millions of years down the line you maybe would run out in the sense that if all the continents are eroded away in that but we're always going to have fossils and we are kind of like in a in a point of like a bit of a golden age at the moment where we're finding so much more stuff like literally it's hard for me to keep up I mean, you heard my pronunciations and those things.

56:05I never heard of them. It's so hard to keep up even as a paleontologist. Like, you should know your job. It's like so hard because there's so much being found. Why are we in a golden period? What makes it a golden period? I think it's more coming down to there's more people looking, for one thing. There's more people, there's more access, like social media and that. Like even when I first went to Wyoming when I was 18, and that was off the back of kind of, I don't know if you've got that kind of thing to chat about, but basically, yeah, I sold my Star Wars collection of action figures. Yeah, I've got that.

56:34Because you mentioned at the start that you're not from a rich background. So I've got here that you studied fossils at the Open University. That costs money though, doesn't it? Yeah, that costs money. My nan, bless her, my nan paid for a short course. She was so sweet, my nan. And she paid for a short course. And it was just literally a one course. I don't know, 10 credits towards a degree. I wouldn't like to get a degree on it. But it was a short course that I did on fossils and the history of life when I was, I think I was 17, 18. and that's because I couldn't go to uni didn't have the grades of the finances and then that that was also quite eye-opening and it was kind of like okay yeah this is interesting but yeah I couldn't go down and do a full degree then but ended up yeah selling my Star Wars collection and others and other other objects and working three jobs I really bloody hated what jobs did you do so I was working primarily the main two were working at a store in a shop in Doncaster which is just delivery so like unpacking like boxes of just random stuff cards and things like that um like helium tanks i remember dropping one of these helium tanks i don't know if you ever held one of them really heavy dropped my fingers and broke my fingers as well should have sued him for that that might have fun the trip but uh that yeah that uh that sort of thing and then also i worked uh at doncaster race course uh on the bar that's the only thing i know about doncaster is it yeah yeah so i worked on the bar there for several years uh to just continue to raise money and go to these places to find stuff and then this is what i say about the golden age is that there's so much more opportunity now but back then there was no social media or anything like that like I I remember going out there that was it was it was when I think about it now it's quite a wild kind of trip and and for my mom and family to kind of be like yeah you just go ahead and do that I know it was a big deal for her she didn't really want me to go on my own first time away from family and friends but it was taking like three flights to get out to like middle of nowhere Wyoming first time ever away from family first time in America wow and uh yeah got there and ended up being like trip of a lifetime for me like there for four four months volunteering at this museum and yeah that's what got my kind of foot on the ladder just while we're on the subject of money how who's funding all of like how do paleontologists earn money because like when you find a fossil yeah is that money to you like do you see that and go i can now sell this to like where's the money come from yeah so it it really varies as well and it kind of touches into like this golden age and kind of like there are right now there's more paleontologists than ever like alive and so and there's more jobs now even though it's still really niche they're still it's super competitive and so you might even get a an undergrad a master's phd and have a whole lot of experience you still might be able to get a job it's that that competitive yeah and so like a large chunk of my work has been freelance and so we work with lots of museums with lots of universities kind of on digs writing books on public lectures on a bit of teaching but then I work with the University of Manchester which is an unpaid position but I work with students and things I've had that affiliation as an honorary research fellow since 2013 and then one of the big things I've managed to get for four years is working as an 1851 research fellow and 1851 is called the Royal Commission of 1851 it's an amazing organization in London and they have funded my research for four years and that's looking at like exceptional fossils of ichthyosaurs with like soft tissues and things, which is like really cutting edge stuff.

59:51So often, Stevie, it's kind of like you'll have museums or, you know, obviously there are paid positions as you might be a curator, a lecturer, professor, or you might be paid kind of to go and dig up dinosaurs in America or wherever it might be and paid field paleontologist. But yeah, it really varies. And it's one of the things where... And I say it's very competitive. And yeah, sometimes you're going to be applying for funding. And it's terrible that you end up applying for funding against some of your friends and colleagues. And if you're lucky and you get it, you're like, oh, I know he didn't get it or she didn't get it, which is bad at the same time.

1:00:24Yeah. So it really does vary. Sorry, are the museums doing it in the hope that they get these new fossils and their way of getting that money back is we've got a new dinosaur. People are going to pay to come and see this. Yeah, kind of in a way like that. Yeah, yeah. So it's a kind of a gray area. so there is like a market for people who will buy land or buy fossils and then sell them and each country has a has kind of their own set of rules and regulations around that and so some places like if you found something and you own the land or whatever or you've got access and you've been given permission technically if you found it you could sell it now the ideal thing is if you found something new to science or something that's really rare you donate it or to a point you might get like a paid donation but sometimes like with museums the incentive or universities is that if you go on a cool expedition and you find something amazing it's a it's hopefully going to be brilliant and it's going to draw lots of interest for the university for the museum but also get lots of great pr and things and which is what's happened with some of my work i've been really lucky to to work on some amazing finds which is generally yeah some great pr so so so this this life-changing expedition in wyoming yeah in 2008 yeah 2008 yeah yeah you you self-funded it you sold your your star wars collection how does it a young uh dean know about this yeah and and and did you know what you were going to do what i mean by that is where you go in right wyoming seems like a hotbed for dinosaur stuff or did you go over there with one single mission in mind a bit of both so you uh to kind of put you kind of in my mindset as what this was in kind of the time frame so I was at the it was the last few months of school of secondary school I was in sixth form and I was in the class with about 25 other students who to be to be blunt they were seen as like the students who were going to do nothing they were the no hopers and I was in there right and and and there was a teacher a substitute teacher who was brought in who I've kept in touch with actually over the years a guy called he was called Mr.

1:02:25Bonacorsi Renato and uh he was going around the class like you know what do you want to do and all this sort of stuff and I was like I the hell is that and so i had to tell him what it was and he said well how are you going to get there and i said oh you know this is this is and he said what's one of the best places in the world i says well america american midwest is great it's you kind of get your foot on the ladder of field work and all that lot so anyway i drafted up an email reached out to a bunch of institutions and one of them well several of them got back and the best one was this place in wyoming the wyoming dinosaur center who said you can volunteer with us if you can get yourself out here raise enough money they'd put me up for accommodation for like three and a half four months and uh and that got me yeah got me into my foot on the ladder went out there and then after that it was for the first time i was like right i kind of like just about got my foot on the ladder i don't know how i'm going to get into this professionally because i didn't have the degree or anything like that but i was like right i'm gonna work my ass off but the way i looked at it that trip was very much career defining and it was kind of a all or nothing approach so for example you were only down to kind of volunteer monday to friday but i'd be there at the weekends i'd be doing every single thing that I could because it to me this was like this was it this is the dream yeah this is the dream and I'm like this this is me chasing the dream there and I'm like if I if I don't do that and if I piss it off at the weekend or whatever what's the point I'm there to learn and meet people and that just yeah opened up the world to me and that got me into kind of understanding academia like I I come from that background of even like academic papers I had no clue what an academic paper was so I had all these students and that going around saying oh have you read this paper read that paper i naively thought they meant fucking newspapers oh wow yeah i said that and uh and they all like laughed laughed at that and i was like well no clue wow well so can you when you so you get there you're in wyoming you're wet behind the ears you're you're new to this uh this this place what does your day-to-day look like i want to picture it as if it's a film what are you going out there and doing dave portnoy here the wait is over football is here and so is draft DraftKings is now live in all 50 states.

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So legit, the first day, well actually I'll take a step back. so just because this story is wild and in very much wyoming i eventually after these three flights got to wyoming it's been a long you know day and a half traveling i'm tired sweaty and i'm like oh man i can't be dealing with this but i just want to get to where i need to be guy rocks up a little bit late and it's another guy who picks up a chap called greg and he's like yeah the guy was meant to pick me quit yesterday i'm like what do you mean he quit i'm like okay so immediately like red flag for me like what's going on here and he's like no no it'll be fine anyway driving back and he's telling me a bit more about the museum and it starts to get to the point where it's like dusk and i'd notice like lots of deer on the road and i'm like you know just general chit chat about deer and it's like yeah deer out populate you know humans here in wyoming i was like okay i was like you ever clipped any and it's like well no within 30 seconds boom straight through bambi like 70 miles per hour and we couldn't swerve or anything if i close my eyes now i can see it yeah it's there it's scorched in the back of my mind and uh greg like kind of turned to me he's like dean are you okay and and my immediate reaction legitimately i said oh dear that's what i said and he burst out laughing and then he put his arm around me he's like welcome to america and that that was literally the first day and then when i started volunteering at the museum the very next day giving a tour the guy who became one of my great friends even to this day a chap called levi he's in you know literally you can kind of picture it like a jeep-like style thing in jurassic park that kind of jeep he literally is playing the jurassic park soundtrack and we're driving up this like mountainous region out to a dig site and it's just so beautiful nothing like you've seen in Doncaster right it's so remote so different were you just in awe of it yeah yeah absolutely loved it and driving up there it's like quite difficult terrain and then we literally listen to Jurassic Park slam the door out there and just pull back um these big sheets these big tarps and they've just got these dinosaur bones just sitting in like rock solid you know like concrete like rock and it's just that's the first time where you've actually i've had a chance to be on a on a dig site like that i'd collected fossils since i was a kid like but the first time seeing these things things i'd seen in documentaries and reading books i was just like this is it this is where i want to be this is what i want to do and and yeah absolutely just loved it and embraced it what what was the the coolest moment out there the coolest moment i would probably say on i think it was that by the end of my first week i was kind of tasked with going around with some of the there was volunteers and a whole lot of students going around to various different dig sites that they'd been working and i'm on by the end of the first week that i was there i'd actually found a massive femur so a femur so a big thigh bone of a sauropod dinosaur looked a bit like diplodocus and that was i remember it got picked up by the media did it did yeah yeah about this kind of uh young lad volunteer from doncaster england who'd found this this giant giant dinosaur did you have to dig very far for that yeah yeah so it was already at a site where they'd found a few bones of like parts of the spine vertebrae and stuff like that and ribs and then it was kind of like hey dean get used to kind of like what it's like to excavate how hard this rock is and it weren't just kind of using hammers and chisels you're using things like oyster knives because which is really random i know but then oyster knives for the it's a mudstone rock around the the bones and so you could kind of pry the the rock away and after i'd kind of yeah spent a couple of days found a top of a bone and it turned out to be a bloody femur and pretty much complete insane yeah it's the first week as well first week as well yeah you can imagine what i was like honestly is there a risk that when you're digging to when you don't know where exactly a bone is but you're in a big i imagine the sites are quite big they can be a massive cva is there not a chance that you're going to go into a bone and like damage to the bone how do you avoid that if you don't even know the bone's going to be there it's so hard as well that because uh it's it's almost to a point almost inevitable and you have to be really careful if you're at a site and you've already got lots of bones there you you can't go kind of like just all out of madness just smashing stuff up and that you've got to be very careful literally piece by piece but sometimes if you're exploring a site where you think there's going to be bones you might bring in like a proper digger a proper excavator and take off layers of layers of rock and then you might find something but yeah it's inevitable that little dinosaur i mentioned hesperon authorities now hold my hands up it wasn't me but uh the person who who did find that when it was found it was found with a pickaxe through its skull and that was yeah which is so annoying because that's like the key part of the skull and that's just how that thing was found do you do you have to be do you have to be fit to do this do you have to yeah to a point yeah yeah yeah i i try to keep fit i used to go i still go to the gym and stuff now but not as not as much as i used to uh you know you always kind of here there and everywhere and i've got a little one as well now so so that makes it a bit more difficult yeah but yeah you have to be pretty fit to be out there especially when i'm like proper expeditions as well like the one i mentioned like chili you you know it's pretty intense and even i i was like oh yeah i'm pretty fit for that but mentally as well as physically is is tough and the one in chili you were cut off completely from the world my phone didn't work or anything like that and that was for just over two and a half weeks what and you can't are you camping there and stuff yeah camping there out in the wilderness you've got i mean especially even in chili we had stories of puma and we were in the area where puma around right there's a story of a one-eyed puma that apparently was hunting people.

1:10:27And we were like, no, that's a lot of rubbish. But yeah, by the end of it, we'd seen puma tracks and everything and puma scat and... Wow. Yeah, so... That was actually my next question. I was going to ask if you ran into any wildlife when you're doing this and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, just literally got back from Queensland, Australia, four days ago. And that was... Are you jet lagged now? I'm not too bad, actually, at the minute. Yeah, I feel like it's going to catch up with me at some point because I'm going to be actually going to Canada next week. Wow. So, yeah, flying around. You've got some life here, dude.

1:10:54No, I love it as well. I absolutely love this stuff. And that's off to look for more giant ichthyosaurs and dinosaurs and stuff too. And the one in Queensland was literally like long ass flight to get there and then meeting some really lovely people. And then we were on another flight and then straight literally to the Australian outback where you're looking at these amazing finds that were mostly found by farmers who have come across like a cool discovery of an ichthyosaur, a plesiosaur, a dinosaur. And you're just like, what the hell? But then some of the animals you come across there, there's obviously things like kangaroos and we saw emu and that which is pretty cool to see did you see any koalas they're my favourite animals I wanted to see a koala we didn't see one I was like could you not like bring one out for me just roll it out of the background like make it a real authentic experience I didn't see one I wanted to see a kookaburra as well I didn't see that but one thing that flew by I kept seeing these bugs and they look pretty nasty and I'm like what's that and they're like you know the local was like that's a bloody assassin beetle that and I'm like an assassin beetle a what and they're like oh yeah

1:11:52Wow. Yeah. Have you found yourself in any dangerous situations with any of these digs? Probably I'd say the most dangerous situation might be the one in Chile. And it wasn't in that much danger, but because we were so kind of out there, we had to be conscious that the terrain there was like really tough. And if it rained, we couldn't actually get out to the proper excavation site because it became, even if you had like the correct gear on, if you're walking out to the site, it was so slippery. And one of the cameramen who I was out there with, he um he'd really badly injured his arm actually but you were five hours uh helicopter ride even to the nearest place so you've got to get them it was really quite dangerous in that and then obviously puma foxes and mice and so there's potential like viruses and stuff and one of the things which on that trip which is bloody sad but we we survived everything out there and the celebratory um celebratory like party like yeah we collected this fossil everybody got parasites from the frigging food.

1:12:47Yeah, I know. So from the person who's cooking at the barbecue, we all got parasites from there. I was like, great, terrible food poisoning, yeah. Oh, no. So you survive the wilderness, drinking, you know, bathing in the rivers and all this stuff. But no, the after party where everybody's celebrating. Somebody clearly didn't cook the food, but he got a bit drunk. Did you ever find anything that's valuable that's not related to bones? Did you find like an antique thing or anything? Yeah, well, actually, yeah, funnily enough. So one of the digs in Wyoming was, again, really a remote location, a few hours drive to get to it.

1:13:21And we were digging up an ancient reptile called a pliosaur. It looks like it's got basically a giant skull. It has four big flippers and a short tail. Kind of you think of it like the T-Rex of the sea type thing. And when we were digging that, this was in Wyoming in 2008 and 2009, we were excavating this site. We actually originally was found in 1895 by this guy who was blowing it up with dynamite. and you probably got drunk blowing it with dynamite but the when we were excavating the site and i i was kind of walking away just kind of looking for more i found an old bottle i think it was a whiskey bottle which was literally dated like 1895 and so that was quite rare because it was probably the fact that this this group of people who are out there probably drunk or getting drunk blowing you know blowing up the site yeah but that's an interesting thing was actually really historically important for that site so we do come across things like that i've never come across stuff like a hoard of coins or anything but yeah that'd be pretty cool if we did because that could help fund the research then donate that to the museum get a they're gonna find a fee for it do um archaeologists go on the digs with paleontologists just in case or is it you kind of know there's not going to be yeah yeah good question yes sometimes i've worked with a couple of archaeologists and yeah it actually can be quite mutually beneficial because sometimes there can be locations like one of the sites that i led the excavation of in the uk the rutland sea dragon I don't know if you've ever heard of that.

1:14:39I've only heard of it when I was researching. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. So that was a mega find made in January 2021, initially by a guy who wasn't even looking for fossils, a chap called Joe Davis in Rutland in the Midlands, walking this site. They basically lowered the water levels of Lagoon, found some big vertebrae. I've actually got one with me. I'll put it out in a second. Yeah, actually from that animal. Wow. Which is pretty awesome. And they found, in fact, let me grab that now. Yeah, wow. So that's actually one of the vertebrae. So you can hold that. that's one of the real vertebrae from the root and seed right i'm not gonna break this am i no please don't is it heavy it's not it's not particularly heavy but it's quite dense it's gone through this process of fossilization but kind of finding this sort of stuff when we were on the site we actually had a few archaeologists because the site was not just for paleontology because the area had been kind of looked after looked over years years before you find archaeological remains and so not too far far from this ichthyosaur there was an arrowhead found so we all joke saying oh maybe some somebody someone had killed it of course they didn't live at the same time and others yeah yeah there's arrowhead found nearby so the archaeological context can can come in handy but yeah that's a a real vertebra so it's about 12 13 centimeters across part of the spine of rutland sea dragon oh this is part of a spine part of the spine yeah so that's a vertebra part of the spine of the rutland sea dragon so this is uh pretty much complete ichthyosaur so i'd led the excavation 21 summer 21 and this is found from the tip of the snout to the end of the tail most complete skeleton of a prehistoric reptile ever found in the uk so how big was this about 10 meters long so that about as long as a school bus what yeah and that's one of the vertebrae look at our spines and look at the size of one of those and that's got near a 200 plus vertebrae and they all differ in size but that's one of the biggest at about 13 maybe 14 centimeters and they got a lot bigger in some species i'm not sure i completely understood that so you so this was in 2021 yep the rutland sea dragon yeah you found the the bones of it yeah is that right yep yeah but what how did that look did that look what intact yeah pretty pretty intact yeah so so the guy who originally found he didn't know what he'd found cheers jack so he didn't know what he'd found he just spotted a couple of bones and the guy who was with him uh he said oh no that's nothing that's just an old pipe and he's like no no i think it's Anyway, it turns out it was bloody something.

1:16:55It was amazing. Spectacularly preserved. Pretty much everything intact. So you imagine this big skull, which was nearly two meters long, and then it was all the spine, including, say, nearly 200-plus vertebrae, right down to kind of like penny-sized vertebrae at the end of the tail. That's a spectacular find. The guy who found that originally, by finding it, does he have a claim on it? So he found it on land owned by a water company, and they look after what's called the Rutland Water Nature Reserve. So by default, it's owned by that institution and then it would be kind of owned by the council because the key thing is then in order for us to study it and everything, it has to be kind of placed into a museum as well.

1:17:37So how come you're allowed a part of it? Oh, they just don't know. They just have to cut that.

1:17:46They're like, oh, we've got a piece missing. have you got anything else you can yeah yeah let me show you a couple of the bits as well so this is uh this is a claw from a dinosaur called baryonyx so my favorite dinosaur is baryonyx and baryonyx was uh again about almost a school bus length dinosaur big meat eating what we call theropod dinosaur kind of to a point our answer to t-rex and this is a thumb claw now this is a reel i've taken this reel and i've took it from the natural history i haven't i I would get in trouble for that. But this is an exact replica of the original one that was found in Surrey in 1983.

1:18:23It was found by a plumber. And it's still, to this day, the only thumb claw of baryonyx. So this is a replica. But you guys, when you're out there doing your field work and you're in the digs, there's every chance you dig up stuff like this. That is the genuine thing. Yeah, yeah. Which is wild, isn't it? And some of the stuff, like one of the most fond memories I have of being on a dig was in uh in montana uh way back in 2009 so the second year i went back to volunteer in wyoming and we went to a dig in montana and we were digging up this bone bed of a dinosaur called myasauro which is nicknamed nicknamed the the good mother lizard and it's uh like bone with lots and lots of dinosaur bones in there like vertebrae spines leg bones in the midst of that we found part of a jaw that was only about 15 centimeters long right and that was of a tyrannosaur and that was a thing called Gorgosaurus, which is almost like the immediate ancestor to T-Rex.

1:19:19And it blew my mind. Like this was just in the midst of it and it's a juvenile one and it had all its teeth in the jaw and me and the guy I found was Greg, he and I was like, holy shit. An incredibly rare find. And that always stuck with me as one of the coolest finds that made. Why is T-Rex so popular? Why is like that the one that everyone's, because it's bigger, isn't there? Like Gigantosaurus? Yeah, so that's probably about, yeah, about the same size as T-Rex. Maybe a tad longer. There is another one like Spinosaurus who is a bit longer than T-Rex. But I think with T-Rex, it's just, I think the skull, because it's such a massive skull and you have those banana-sized teeth.

1:19:53And also because of Jurassic Park especially has really kind of like solidified in people's minds of like the typical... The poster boy for that. The poster boy, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Poster boy with the kind of like meat-eating dinosaurs. Yeah, I feel like there's like certain dinosaurs that everyone will know, like Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, Brachiosaurus, I guess, Pterodactyl. Yeah, not a dinosaur, that one. Is it not? No, no, no, it's not. So, yeah, it's a pterodactyl. So they're flying reptiles. And they were, again, alive at the same time dinosaurs. But if you think a family tree, they split off kind of roughly about 240-odd million years ago.

1:20:26So things like the ichthyosaurs, swimming reptiles, a bit like that. But pterosaurs and dinosaurs do share, like, they're basically like cousins. Right. Yeah. Right. Let's go back to this claw. So I don't know if people can see how big that is. How big would we say that is? How big is that? I think altogether, if you measured it, if you straightened out, it's about nearly 30 centimetres. And it would have been longer as well. So if you imagine like for what we've got on our nails, so that in our nails and our hair is keratin. Yeah. And that would have had, if you imagine kind of like a rhino, that keratinous sheath on its horn.

1:20:56So it would have had a layer over the top of that. So it would probably add another five centimetres or something. Wow. That would do some damage. Yeah, even today. That's the thumb claw of what, Diana? Thumb claw of baryonyx. Right. Which was, it was in one of the Jurassic World films. and I know I don't know if you've seen like the Camp Cretaceous series too that's the animated yeah the animated one yeah so it's one of the famous ones from that oh okay so my favourite dinosaur it's like I carry this everywhere yeah I had that when I briefly met you Jack at the Jurassic World premiere did you so no wonder I got the security up in arms like waving that around at some of the celebrities hey Scarlett Johansson yeah the baryonyx is here so yeah I definitely I've definitely seen this before that's a scary looking dinosaur yeah yeah yeah it's pretty cool what was the dinosaur show I was talking about on air a few months ago.

1:21:41Do you remember? The new one with Morgan Freeman on Netflix. Oh, yeah, yeah. So I worked briefly behind the scenes on that. Oh, did you? Yeah, I was one of many consultants, only kind of important a little bit, but one of my big areas, I know you'll probably want to chat as well because we can talk forever on this stuff too. Yeah, I do as well. As you can say, I won't show up once I get going. No, I love it. I absolutely love it, mate. Yeah, one of the big areas is media. And that one, I worked super brief on a couple of scenes there with the team behind it. silverback films and who did a really wonderful job and yeah netflix i'm really happy that it that paleo and paleontology dinosaurs like goes into kind of mainstream because that's done really well and to get someone like uh like morgan freeman as well on the rate and getting excited by dinosaurs pretty cool one thing about that is um obviously like they have you guys like the experts helping them say what the how the dinosaurs would have looked and moved and stuff like that Yeah, yeah.

1:22:32But because obviously they need to appeal to a wider audience. Yeah. The storylines of the dinosaurs are obviously made up, aren't they? Right? Yeah, that's, yeah, yeah. Generally speaking, yeah. But how accurate can they be? Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I know. And that's one of the things where, generally speaking, if you've got a storyline like pretty much every single storyline that's in that series, any other paleo series that you've watched is based on, hey, this is what we think they probably did. by comparison with like modern animals and kind of like hey family life uh say it could be let's say it's an african savannah and you've got kind of a pride of lions and they're caring for their young and that sort of thing they're going out hunting that sort of behavior we would have seen in dinosaurs too and they they probably weren't as intelligent to say a pride of lions but they would have had some sort of like cooperative behaviors and things and so often when you watch it it's like yeah it's really difficult to say hey this is based on evidence but then this is a say that you do have as a cover in the book you do have some direct evidence what you can kind of tap tap into but yeah that's what makes it really hard and that's why it's more about kind of here's some really cool storylines that we can tell based on real fossils and then you kind of unpack this is what they probably did right it's it's your guys like scientists best guess right yeah that sort of thing yeah and then even even when you have the direct evidence of behavior it's okay even if you've had the last meal of a dinosaur that was eaten by a mammal it's like okay how did that happen what was that interaction like was it a fight between those two things and that's where it's like oh maybe it's a bit more conjecture do you have do you ever help with that kind of oh yeah yeah yeah that sort of stuff too so yeah yeah no it's it's a cool thing like i touch upon touching upon like media and stuff so i really fell into kind of tv and radio and that like really randomly and it came off the back of that trip to Wyoming I said like the local press and that got interested and then I did like local stuff like appearing on the news chatting about a few things and then I did some stuff with with the BBC kind of been on BBC Breakfast on the sofa that's so cool yeah like Countryfile and things like that and the one show and and then I did a big series the first big thing I did was I'd um co-hosted a ITV1 primetime series a two-part series called Dinosaur Britain and that was based on one of my books, Dinosaurs of British Isles.

1:24:49And that got me into like media and stuff. And so in my kind of media zone, I'll work behind the scenes as a consultant or advisor, but also I've been an executive producer for a couple of documentaries. And then I've been the person who's been hosting these things, which I really love. I mean, it opens up and I've got to be honest, like I never in like millions of years would have thought I'd have gone into bloody TV. Not at all. Because if you'd met me like as a teenager, I was super shy, unless you start talking about dinosaurs how's it going there i said chat up lines so it goes like it's your favorite dinosaur yeah that's the other thing but yeah i uh i just yeah just loved it all and then it just kind of yeah got kind of picked up in terms of tv stuff and when even one of the coolest memories i had was within recent time a few years ago i introduced one of the documentaries that i was an exec producer and like the leading paleontologist for a doc it was called why dinosaurs which followed this father and son duo in america kind of basically like hey my son wants to be a paleontologist how do you get into it and it's like a six year long thing i introduced that in the heart of hollywood on sunset boulevard on the same bloody stage that uh leonardo dicaprio and martin scorsese was on like the other night or a week before and i was like pinch myself kind of thing like that from doncaster doing that was yeah but it's paid off because you have such a raw passion for it as I imagine most of the top people in in in this field do because it's such a niche isn't it like you you can't blag your way into it absolutely not no and that's it no matter how much you you might try you you really can't and you've got to really make a you know make you you know basically carve out your own career and as we kind of touched upon like my my career is really unconventional you know I failed in school failed science never did an undergraduate degree i'd written a bunch of academic papers worked my ass off and then did a master's then my phd and then now i have you know i have students work with students i lead digs around the world and write books and tv stuff so it's it's but it is it's bloody hard work and and it's just like i always say it's that passion perseverance and just keeping at it yeah well that's that's showing true but thanks with with your unconventional way into the the what this world did you have to feel like you had to prove yourself more more than the sort of people who had like gone through the traditional route.

1:27:01Yeah, enormously so too. And being like totally honest with you, especially the first five years, there were some total arrogant arseholes who were so dismissive, you know, oh, you're not really a paleontologist, oh, you're not going to get there, you know, what you're doing, you're just playing paleontologist and stuff. And it's really sad because even after those few years, and it's silly that you have to think like this, and I'm not this kind of character, but even at that point, there's a few people who'd be like that, and I'd have written more academic papers than them. And I'm like, just because you've got a couple of papers, as in they had their master's or PhD, doesn't make you better than me.

1:27:37And of course, after I did PhD as well, they were like, oh shit, we can't say anything. And you've had some of those people. It's funny, I'm like, I remember you. It's that sort of thing where you had people who would be like, oh, hey, Dr. Lomax, great to see you. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You didn't used to say that 15 years ago, did you? Yeah, it's so frustrating, isn't it? It's so frustrating. And the good thing is because I'm very humble with it as well. And because of my kind of story getting into paleontology, I very much kind of like everybody who I meet, I have so many people, if I give talks, events, and I've given like TED talks and big talks, like I'm currently doing like the book tour for the Secret Eyes of Dinosaurs.

1:28:15And 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 know, 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 and be 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.

1:28:45And I'm like, that's such a lovely thing. And I know going back to those people who were really, you know, real assholes with me early on, which was very discouraging. and 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 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, the world we live in now with the internet, YouTube, all this kind of stuff, and I'm not discouraging anyone from going to university and stuff.

1:29:19Obviously, you need to for a lot of jobs out there. but we have our own route into things do you know what i mean like i've like like we we i've never studied comedy or comedy writing or anything like that but yeah we were able to do our tour and people would argue what wasn't traditional stand-up but we were able to sell out a tour a lot of comedians will look at that and go why are people going going yeah yeah yeah i mean he's never done the edinburgh fringe festival but we can do it our own ways now we can get into things it's a modern world we live yeah we're at a time now that conventional doesn't matter so much anymore obviously yours is a very different field but the fact that you've been able to prove that you don't always have to take the conventional route maybe someone listening to this now might go we'll be inspired by that yeah yeah no 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 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 more jobs and that's more so with not just in academia or kind of like you know field work but also social media and public engagement there are more jobs where museums, universities, probably last five, ten years are 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 subject.

1:30:31For sure, for sure. I want to go back to where were we? It was in Wyoming. One thing I'm fascinated by and again, just before we started, we were talking about Pokemon. The one thing I like about Pokemon is how you can get different Pokemon in different regions so you'll find the santru in the grass and blah blah blah blah blah uh as i got older i realized pokemon's kind of real like animals i love that you like the koala's native to australia and like the capybara's native to south america and i i love this is there are there dinosaurs that i'm sure there were but were native to different parts of the world and if so uh is there any countries that we've never found dinosaurs in yes that's great a really really good comparison as well.

1:31:17I love that. Pokemon is such a good one. I've done a couple of bits and pieces of events and kind of got them into some of my talks because they're really good. I mean, I loved Pokemon growing up. My favourite Pokemon was Charizard. What was your favourite? I like a Gengar. Venusaur, Bulbasaur guy. Yeah, and I loved it growing up. Pokemon Blue and Pokemon Red. I still love it to this day, but you're absolutely right. So you find different types of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals in different continents. And for dinosaurs in particular, we have found dinosaurs on every single continent you've even found them buried in the bedrock in Antarctica so still in in the bedrock and even showcasing that when they were alive what now you you see as as uh as an icy kind of area barren area that was like a tropical rainforest type thing and that's based on the fossils of plants and things you found that find there too and it's quite amazing that you do find that but there are there are places though that you if you talk about ichthyosaurs so in although ichthyosaurs are found globally africa they're really really rare and there's only fragments found which i've never really understood and i think it's primarily because it's we don't have the best kind of marine sediments kind of like ancient marine life sea life and that sediments that we'd find ichthyosaurs in but it's always about exploration i mentioned like getting back from from queensland just literally a few days ago you've been out there seeing just farmers who are coming across this cool stuff out in the outback it's just so wild so remote but that stuff is i've said it kind of i said we did a lot of tv stuff out there and i did a live it's pretty cool we did a live uh live feed from a big breakfast show tv breakfast show out at one of the dig sites that i was digging at and we were we were showing a plesiosaur coming out the ground it was so awesome it was like really really cool like live like five minute segment and we were saying like this is the stuff like this is caught an edge and it was and it is it's one of the coolest places on the planet is with queensland and the outback because it's kind of it's an emerging field it's only been maybe the last 20 30 years that australia generally has got really kind of well and truly on the paleontology map but this is what i love about this stuff you don't know what you're going to find it only takes one new discovery it blows it out of the water yeah that's so exciting yeah yeah so exciting dave portnoy here the wait is over football is here and so is draft kings draft kings is now live in all 50 states.

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1:34:27We'll be right back. you had to name one place in the world where you're like the most amount of dinosaurs have come out of there what where's the dinosaur place i'd probably say one of the best places still is like is like north america it is wyoming montana and then there's a place which i'm heading back to next week which is uh in alberta and that's uh it's as you might imagine it's named dinosaur provincial park where you are walking every kind of five feet and you're walking over dinosaur boats like there's so much stuff can anyone go there or is it just the just anybody can go there but you can't collect material unless you have a permit and so we even there's been times i've been out there and we found stuff but we've had to leave it there and then report it and be like hey if if this turns out to be important you better name that after me in the future give me that that dinosaur yeah is it is there any chance i've got a dinosaur under my house whereabouts do you live in norwich in norwich yeah so norwich's geology if i'm not mistaken probably not but there's a good chance you might have a mammoth under under your uh your house so yeah i'll come and dig up the back garden if you want yeah so so norwich's kind of geology is is more uh and i could be wrong there'll be probably people saying oh no no it's not just that there are uh the bedrock probably goes back quite a bit further but i know in norwich in that area there has been remains of mammoths in fact one of the most complete mammoths i think was was found not too far away i think from there yeah yeah yeah i think i've if we're talking about the same thing there was a big news story i was i feel like i saw something on the coastline they found a big mammoth in uh in the in the rock didn't they yeah that sounds familiar i'm pretty sure that's it because i was kind of asking that question to purposely to be a bit stupid but like not specifically norwich but like that i i guess the the broader question is are there people will there be people listening to this who like that are there are there dinosaurs on the bones in the in london parks are there dinosaurs all around or do you have to go to these specific like digs in wyoming are they everywhere yeah they pretty much to a point they are everywhere but it's always a case of if you start digging up your back garden it's unlikely you're going to find a dinosaur but you never say never yeah but it all just depends on kind of the geology like what age of rocket that is and you can work that out with a little bit of googling you know have a look on the internet read a couple of books and you can find out roughly what the geology is and it'll tell you yeah you might find a mammoth or something but you it's not impossible as well like 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 is among the best places in the whole of europe to find find dinosaurs for example is it yeah so you you can find this stuff and even so growing up in Doncaster.

1:37:08Doncaster was 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 like fossils of fossil plants and insects and fossil poo and even found a a shark egg case in because some sharks they they like lay these soft shell eggs a shark egg case in doncaster and that was the first ever in in south yorkshire wow and that was a site that was bloody five minutes away from the house i grew up in which is madness so if you get a rock even you crack it open yeah is that how you is that how you find a yeah so it can be yeah and sometimes Sometimes you might be so lucky just walk along.

1:38:03If you know it's the right area, you might have an exposure. You might find something. How do you know it's going to have something in it? Well, it reminds me. So I do actually have with me... It's kind of a bit more show and tell and get a bit practical. This is so fun, by the way. I love this. Yeah, this is brilliant. Yeah, so I thought I'd bring this one with me. So I've got my hammer and chisel and safety glasses. I should probably have some for myself as well. Audio listeners want to come over for video for this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically, yeah, I've got my hammers and chisels. Here you go, Jack.

1:38:31Yeah, thank you. Pop those on. so i'll pop them on as well so this is literally a specimen i'd found and it just looks like a a pebble you can have a have a look as well jack steve we've got a standard stone it's got kind of like a rail going along it like i don't know that's got it's like there's something in there isn't it yeah it's like a pattern and so when you're out looking for for fossils you'll look for like structures in the rock it's always good to have a bit of an idea don't just go out don't don't open up a copy of my book i'm like yep i'm gonna go and find that that's not gonna happen and you're going to be a bit disappointed.

1:38:59But you go out looking for things like this. I found this one near Whitby. So the Yorkshire coast, I grew up collecting fossils there. My mum, bless her, she'd always say to me, she'd be so supportive and say, hey, we'll go collecting fossils in Whitby. And this was one I'd found probably not too long ago. And what you're looking for here is a correct shape. So it's what we call a nodule. But in there, it's very clear that there's something in that rock. And I know it's a fossil, but then what you can do, and hopefully with a little bit of paleo magic and hopefully not going to cut my finger off with this, Jack.

1:39:30You can give me a hand with this so you can actually tap it open. So how are you saying there's something in it? It's like a Kabuto, isn't it? Like a little fossil stone. So it looks like that. Yeah, yeah. So the best one for that is if you think about like Ammonite. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a type of creature called an Ammonite. Yeah. Pokemon got it from these Ammonites. Right. And so this is a really water-worn Ammonite. But I know that if we manage to pop this open, hopefully it'll pop open perfectly, you'll have a perfectly preserved one on the inside. Wow. And it's the sort of thing where you can just walk along a beach and you see pebbles.

1:40:01That can totally change your perception of that and of time, geologic time. But look, let's see if this works. And did you find this? Yep, yeah, I found this. So if I hold that there, I'm going to give you this where we break the table. I don't want to break your fingers. That's what I'm worried about. This is going to be nice for the audio as well, isn't it? Just anyone listening, expect a bit of a bang whilst Jack chisels down into this. Do I need to go harder? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:40:34There we go. Keep going.

1:40:39A little bit more. It's breaking off, isn't it?

1:40:49There's a little bit more, so it's not popped as nice as it could have. Do you want me to do it? No, no, no. It's okay. No, no, no. So let's see. Sometimes this is what happens as well with fossils. So you give it one more shot if you want. So sometimes they don't pop perfectly. And this is one of the other things as well. Let's see. It gives you an idea. You've got part of the structure inside there. Oh, yeah. And so this is a case of this probably wasn't preserved very well, but you have at least part of it. But that gives you an idea. I mean, that still is roughly a 180 million-year-old ammonite, which is pretty amazing.

1:41:23Can you try and describe what that looks like, Steve? Well, not at the moment because I can't see it. We also have another one if we want to give it another go. Yeah. Do you want to give it a go, Steve? We'll swap seats. Yeah, let's do it. Give it a go. Right, I'm taking videos of this, so the viewers will get a better view of it. Hopefully it's not going to damage your table. I need your glasses. I've got to keep myself safe. Okay. All right then, Stevie. So, same sort of thing. tap down here let's see if it works yep

1:41:57all right a bit more how we doing that's good that's good i'm scared of going too hard

1:42:10oh there you go oh look at that wow oh my god first time ever seen that in 180 million years It's like an Omnite, isn't it? Yeah, and then so that is one of these creatures. And I was swimming around in the Jurassic Sea as well as Dichthyosaurs and Plesiosaurs were in the same ocean. It's pretty amazing. That is. You find these things. And let's say, obviously, I've been finding, probably must have found somewhere in the region about 50 ,000 fossils. That's probably what I found over my career. And you still have that magical kind of experience seeing that because also you never know. You could have popped that open.

1:42:46there could have been a tooth in there or something you don't you don't know but so when you're walking about we and you see it see something like that you just pick it up yeah yeah yeah even if you're not working you're just like i want to see what that oh yeah absolutely yeah yeah definitely that this isn't worked i am yeah wow that's insane so so that creature this creature here this would that have looked like a little snail then or something yeah that sort of thing so if you imagine it as kind of like a bit like a snail inside a hardened shell and think of like an octopus and the octopus would have been...

1:43:20So it's like, yeah, it's a curled shell and then kind of the opening that had been kind of all arms and like you've seen... Like an Omastark. Yeah, like Omni, Omastark and Pokemon, that sort of thing. The big shell and then like a creature at the bottom. I'm going to be really dumb here. That's not the actual animal itself, is it? So it is, but what's happened? So that animal's died and then the original structure of that shell has been replaced by sediment. So imagine this animal's died. You could use a Pokemon. So imagine Amonite's died, gone to the bottom of the seabed. It's been covered over by sand and sediment.

1:43:54And then over time, over millions of years, the original structure is replaced by minerals from the surrounding sediment. And that's what causes fossilization. That's a process called permineralization. And that's why you see some of the minerals and stuff like that, the shiny bits in there. That looks insane, doesn't it? Yeah, it's awesome. I'm glad that one popped as well, because that's the other thing. Sometimes they don't. And it's often a case of the first one, it might have been that it's just not been preserved very well. Right. And that one obviously was preserved better. I wouldn't know how to fully describe it to an audio listener.

1:44:22So Jack's filmed it also. Go look at it on video. But it's basically like a spiral shell with lines going all the way through it. Yeah. But it does look really cool. It does look cool. Yeah. Would you encourage people to pick rocks up and do this kind of thing? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's one of the best ways to kind of engage with natural history. and also you can you both can keep that oh wow we'll put it on the set that's really cool that's really cool yeah what's gone sorry no it's it's one of the ways in which i think not just kind of for people getting into paleontology and stuff but also just understanding and having appreciation like the natural world yeah i remember watching many many years ago like i was a massive fan of sir david attenborough as well yeah everybody is right love attenborough and he was was one of the Like, you know, as a kid, he used to collect fossils locally where he grew up in Leicestershire.

1:45:12And he said, and I always take this philosophy as well, is finding something like that. You know, it is the first time you've ever seen that. That was once a living, breathing creature during the Jurassic, age of dinosaurs and stuff. It can just spark that curiosity. And I always say fossils and dinosaurs in particular are a unique gateway into science. So often for people, for children especially, it's your first introduction to science. And it might be that, you know, I never kind of go out to be like, hey i want to inspire a whole load of paleontologists it's just to get people excited about it and appreciate it so there is something about that like i don't know if it sounds cheesy but there is something magical like holding that like a bit like being the first person to ever see that yeah that's nuts isn't it it is it is and and you can find these types of things or other types of fossils anywhere kind of around around the world and it's just knowing that having that little bit of information the amount of people that i've kind of obviously led digs and and done kind of like public groups over the years and things.

1:46:07And one in particular always stuck with me was actually in Wyoming. There was a family who came to dig with me at the museum and the little girl, she was probably about six or seven. She was so excited, you know, she want to get out on the dig. And her older sister was a teenager. She was like 13, 14. And she was like, yeah, this is dumb. I don't want to do this. And anyway, I'd kind of set the family up and her sister, the older one, she was like, yeah, I don't want to do this. I was like, that's all right. Take your time and kind of set her off digging over there anyway she found another giant bone of a dinosaur and it blew her mind and she absolutely loved it after that because she wasn't interested but then as soon as you have that that kind of feeling of discovery and seeing it for the first time it was just like oh bloody hell like look at this thing do you ever get emotional when you find stuff yeah i mean to a point yeah i think from whether it's kind of discovering something in a museum and working working out like it's a new species or whatever i remember that with the ichthyosaurus ania one after working out that was a new species and thinking i'm going to be the first person in history to name one after mary anning was quite a an emotional thing yeah and to have that but also that one of the most emotional ones was finding that that ichthyosaur out in near the glacier in chile because i knew what it meant for the for the community as well for the for the locals who who studied this stuff and even even to the point of the trip to queensland being out in way back outback kind of we went to two places one in Winton and one in Richmond where the communities are less than a thousand people living there being there was quite eye-opening and surreal because I'm there examining the fossils that they found I'm giving a talk I'm brought in as this international paleontologist and media person but I met so many people who were just so kind of like pleased to meet me and to be in their community and to help shine a light on their you know their place you you quickly realize that it's it's far bigger than just paleontology you're helping that community and you had kids coming up to like shaking my hand and be like i'm not washing my hand now like getting me to sign their hands and sign their arms and i was like that's yeah it's crazy but it's it's so funny that you can see that and again that's just through through fossils yeah through paleontology but yeah you you do get that kind of emotion with it um again might be a stupid question but you've obviously um done so much great work but if if you what's the question if you could have any discovery or or find anything what would be the dream thing for dr lomax to to find or dream thing i'd probably say because one of my biggest kind of discoveries and naming the ichthyotitan which is this animal based on two massive jaw bones like absolutely enormous jaw bones based on them and comparing them to other ichthyosaurs we're talking animal that's 25 26 meters right so that's blue whale sized animal i kind of predicted that based on that these animals probably were bigger than blue whales what i would love to find is a complete skeleton like that because there are people who have criticized some of my research they know they weren't that big and i'm confident they were that's what i'd love to find and i think it's out there and i think it's the case of we just need to get out and explore more that's a really cool answer yeah yeah that's it is it how likely is it that you could find that i think it's likely yeah i think it's likely yeah some of the digs that i went on last year in canada and the one i'm going on next week we're um we are looking for more of those types of things so who knows by the end of next week i might be like holy shit there we go we're doing part two we found it how much criticism is there in your line of work as you just then said people about that discovery criticize that like how often do you find something where you know people are gonna kind of have their version of what you're finding yeah great one that stevie so weirdly enough it's such a strange field of paleontology where generally speaking most people are supportive and everybody's kind of like encouraging but you do get people who are just yeah super critical no matter what and it's kind of like oh especially with me because i do a lot of media stuff and i'll do whether it's tv or speak on the radio it's kind of oh yeah dean i saw you on the tv i remember one guy saying to me you made an arse of yourself and i'm like what speaking to you know i think we had an audience of three million people and who are you speaking to five yeah but you know what i mean it's like no you should be doing outreach yeah but you do get your criticisms in there and it's not all critical of course like i said a lot of people are supportive but you do get that and it's you you kind of have to you quickly realize as well that you have to have a bit of a thick skin with it and just unfortunately just get some arrogant assholes in the field i guess like every every hour isn't it is that because it's competitive or just jealousy or both yeah yeah yeah so it can be very competitive and i've had it where it does get very um there is quite a lot of like jealousy in the field as one especially you know i'm very appreciative that i've kind of had the opportunities i've worked hard to get them into kind of media and doing talks and worked my kind of way up and experience of presenting and that and people do get jealous of that as well but to me it's kind of like i think you've got to be doing that especially a field like paleontology it's all you know it's a fantastic field but you've got to be sharing your passion with people of course yeah you get a lot of jealousy as well the the the astronauts that went on the moon got told they never went on the moon by idiots and and the the scientists that develop vaccines get told they shouldn't take the vaccine there's always going to be idiots yeah what do you say to people, the small minority of people out there that say that dinosaurs never existed.

1:51:30You're a fucking idiot.

1:51:33So you get people like tweet you and stuff like that? Oh yeah, yeah, every time, every time. And I've been in situations where professionally I have to be very careful, obviously. But I've been at a big event where I've, again, had hundreds of people come to an event of mine and someone's bought a ticket and they ask a question and you're like, I know where they're going with it. And it's kind of like, how do you really know it's that old and and didn't they all live at the same time and weren't they on you know a boat and i'm like what kind of boat was that and it's like okay they're on the ark and all this you know it's that and you've got these kind of questions and you have to be especially when you're giving a talk and it's around like families and stuff you have to be diplomatic uh about it but it is very hard i mean i've generally had people be like um so the Loch Ness Monster then that's real isn't it and you're like uh and then you you again you've got to be careful how you do it but you're kind And I'm like, well, obviously not.

1:52:24It's not. And here's the reasons behind that. As much as I'd love to say, yeah, it is. But yeah, so it's hard to deal with some of that. Is it true, I read a fact, and I'm going to butcher this now, but is it true that one species of dinosaur was so far from existing at the point of time from another one that there is actually a dinosaur that's closer to the iPhone? Yeah, yeah. So to use two really famous ones, so Stegosaurus. Yeah. You know Stegosaurus, yeah, plate of dinosaur spikes on its tail. That was already kind of was living and went extinct before T-Rex appeared. And T-Rex is closer in time to us in an iPhone than it was to Stegosaurus.

1:53:08That's mad, isn't it? Ridiculous. That is mental. So Stegosaurus was living like 150, 155 million years. T-Rex was about 60, 68 million years ago. How wild is that? Yeah. It's so mind-blowing. and that's when you start to think about the age of the earth and tragic time. What is Loch Ness meant to be, like Nessie? Is that a dinosaur? Yeah. The idea of it, I mean. Yeah, it's meant to be one of these long-necked plesiosaur things, so another swimming marine reptile, and the idea is that when the Loch was forming, somehow a plesiosaur survived from the Cretaceous. Of course, the oldest fossils we have of a plesiosaur are about 66 million years ago, so that's a good chunk of time that it's been hiding there.

1:53:46But the easiest way to kind of dispel it, which is sad, because it would be amazing if it was an actual thing was a plesiosaur. But the lock itself is only like, I think, roughly 10 ,000 or so years old, and that's when it formed. There's no way that a plesiosaur was even able to get into that lock at that point anyway. So, yeah, and then this is where you have people like, oh, but maybe it was dormant and it came up, and I'm like, no, it's not Godzilla. That's probably not the case. What is the biggest unsolved mystery in paleontology? Ask a question, Jack, yeah.

1:54:17There's many. there there's yeah there's an awful lot of them i think one of the things which always kind of struck me and i guess we touched upon it a bit earlier is that of all the dinosaurs and we had so many different groups when the when the asteroid did hit and that did happen and wiped out all groups t-rex triceratops and sauropods and things that only group that did survive are birds and we we have a good understanding as to why that is because they were they could adapt better obviously they could fly they could borrow all this sort of stuff but it isn't a bit of a mystery still that some species that equally could have done this stuff that did disappear and so i think that you only had the birds as the only living representative dinosaurs that remained was still quite not the sea ones yes they all disappeared yeah so yeah so ichthyosaurs plesiosaur i mean ichthyosaurs actually had gone a few million years before that even still well and that's that's a mystery why yeah so that is quite a mystery as well they disappeared about 93 million years ago and we don't really understand why because they had these kind of dolphin shark shaped bodies the most kind of adapted what we call like vertebrate backbone animals in the oceans more adapted than even cetaceans so dolphins and whales today and they went extinct and the idea is probably a combination of competition from sharks and other reptiles but maybe some sort of there is some evidence to show that maybe there's a difference in climate and it could be climate change affected their food source primary food source like squid and fish and as a result they they decimated, declined and disappeared.

1:55:42Is there ever a chance some of them were just like, what we say, like pandas now, pandas just aren't keen to get with each other, are they? So they're not having more pandas. So they're worried. There's a good chance. Where are the dinosaurs going? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can't be arsed. There's a good chance it could be something like that to be like, you know what? Screw it, I'm not interested, whatever. I'd rather die. Next book, do it about frigid dinosaurs. I'll get an endorsement for you, that's the... I'll be your slash on Amazon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I love it. do you do you have any i don't know if it's like pet peeves but do you like the way that dinosaurs are portrayed in film and television is is there anything that people get wrong all the time yeah i think it is one of the things where like i as a paleontologist you a lot of people say oh you must hate jurassic park and hate jurassic world now but actually no i'm quite a big fan of them although they get a lot of stuff wrong you know that one of the big things is that you often see like things now we know within the last 20 30 years that there is direct evidence of colors and feathers and things and yet generally speaking they haven't introduced that like really vivid colors and that so that's one of the pet peeves i get yeah because you do get like still wichthyosaurs kind of like swimming dinosaurs and things that and mosasaurs and stuff that i would probably say but yeah i think with jurassic park jurassic world it's we do have that evidence now of these sorts of things and yeah it'd be nice to see a bit more at least in movies although i also hold my hands up it is a monster movie it's not a documentary yeah so yeah it can be a bit more critical when it's a documentary and they've not done it right i'm like should know better yeah how are they getting so many things wrong when there are people working behind the scenes in your field yeah it's hard so somebody who does literally work in that sometimes and it's not every every kind of documentary or every production company or movie but even if you might even pay for a consultant or an advisor, it still comes down to a producer or an artist like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's great, that's great.

1:57:30I'm not going to do that, but thanks for all that information. And they still want to go ahead and do what they were going to do anyway. Right. And I get it to a point because they kind of feel like, oh, that might be the better story to tell, and it doesn't need to be scientifically accurate. Yeah. But, yeah, it does open up problems for paleontologists. One of the most famous is the Jurassic World, what's it called, Indominus Rex. So that wasn't a real dinosaur. It was kind of a splice of one or two different things. I thought it was a cool idea because they were making their own dinosaur. But then for children, they've seen that.

1:58:00Oh, that's a real dinosaur. And I've had a couple of kids say, hey, my favorite dinosaur is Indominus. I'm like, well, kid, that's not really a real dinosaur. I'm like, yeah, it is. They're arguing with a five-year-old for like an hour. They do say in the movie it's not real. Yeah, they do. They're saying they've created this. Exactly, yeah. Which is good and fair to them. But yeah, there are those things where it becomes a little bit like, it's a bit hard to kind of do you and deal with. the book we spoke about um obviously the new discovery that the t-rex probably had feathers yeah yeah different colors and stuff um what what are we talking like there could be dinosaurs out there that were blue reds but i'm confident of it yeah yeah yeah definitely and if you think of with birds being dinosaurs and you think of say say birds of paradise like look how brightly colored some of some of them are i mean even just look you know you might see today a robin a pigeon even you know some of the colors you get in pigeons are that like different like kind of blues and would it be like peacocking because obviously if they're trying to use like these wings as display to get mating and stuff and i'm confident we we have found some evidence of that sort of thing like even one of the coolest dinosaurs and one of the first to show kind of colors in dinosaurs was a little basically about the size of a chicken but had a really long tail on it was a thing called cynosauropteryx and that was found in china in lyoning and that was found to have a kind of like gingery fuzzy feathers and then along its tail it had like this banded kind of stripe and so you had a stripey tail that was white and gingery color.

1:59:27How do we know that sorry? And so that's based on so you have the soft tissue preservation in its skin and its feathers and then locked inside the feathers you have these tiny pigments which we call melanosomes and they are the same things that are in our coloration of our skin you look at it in feathers today anything and under the microscope they still have the same structure that you preserved in the fossils. They've just gone through that fossilization process, which is phenomenal. And even 30 years ago, you ask a paleontologist then, they'd be like, oh no, you'll never find anything like that.

1:59:56And now it's like, oh, okay, you do. And that's why it's like the field's so like... Just always evolving. Yeah, always evolving, yeah. What would you say has been the greatest discovery that we've learned about dinosaurs in perhaps your lifetime? Oh, in my lifetime, I'd say it's that they were feathered. Yeah, feathered and the colouring that we have with them, I think, is pretty spectacular. Because even going back 30 plus years, there was still this understanding that dinosaurs were kind of stupid. They were more lizard-like. They were cold-blooded, that sort of thing. Whereas in reality, these discoveries really revolutionised that thinking.

2:00:31Just completely switched our thinking around. That actually, no, they were probably fast-moving, probably warm-blooded or a combination of warm-blooded, cold-blooded. and that they were really dynamic animals that had these kind of unique behaviours and things that you'd see in birds and stuff today and crocs. What's the difference between warm-blooded and cold-blooded? So if you think of warm-blooded and cold-blooded, if you think of, say, a typical cold-blooded animal would be, say, like a crocodile. So you see it basking in the sun and it's warming up its body. Whereas a warm-blooded animal, we can regulate our body temperature being warm-blooded.

2:01:05Would that make one of those smarter than the other then or not? Not necessarily. Well, if it defines that, it depends if you kind of say, yeah, is it smart because it's warm blood, therefore it can be active in its own right, it doesn't need to warm up as it were. Yeah. And that's the sort of thing where the old school kind of thinking was, yeah, if they were just cold-blooded, they were more like, kind of like in quotes, reptilian brain, and that's the more stupid thing, which is really sad because there's a lot of reptiles today that are really smart. Right. Even in the family tree of things, birds technically are actually a weird form of reptile, and we see birds that even go fishing.

2:01:37they'll get sticks and they'll tap water for fish to come up and they'll catch fish yeah but dinosaurs way back dinosaurs were probably doing that sort of thing as well do you think i'm confident of it yeah confident of it which is which is yeah we love even thinking about that i don't know if we're able to get one of them preserved you know bird holding a stick and catching a fish fishing dinosaur maybe very rare to have but do you think there are dinosaur species out there that we have lost forever and that weren't fossilized for any reason yeah yeah absolutely yeah yeah definitely and it's it's one of the things where even to this day we've probably only got about 1500 maybe a push 2000 dinosaurs that we found but the chances are in their entire history if you think the first dinosaurs appeared on the planet about 230 plus million years ago and then ignoring birds t-rex that go extinct about 66 million years that's a massive chunk of time and we only have 2 000 species chances are you're talking countless species it's unimaginable we've got like i don't know but like we've got like millions of species of animals right now yeah yeah so we only have two thousand yeah just during that that massive amount of time as well yeah there must have been so many more which we'll never know existed and that's the thing with fossilization like the the ammonite that we were just just kind of opening there that like fossilization is a really rare process and it's it's a lot easier in a marine realm because you need water generally to preserve as an animal preserving animals a fossil but for dinosaurs they were were living on land and so in order for us to get a fossil it had to have died somewhere relatively quickly as well and be covered by water and sediment so to find a skeleton of say a t-rex or a baryonyx or something is is a lot rarer than a marine animal so in millions of years time We're not going to get fossils of like dogs and shit now, are we?

2:03:18We'd probably get the odd one or two dogs here and there that maybe ventured off somewhere and got stuck in a bog or something like that. We probably would do, yeah. But we wouldn't get them as kind of like, they wouldn't be really plentiful because they wouldn't be swimming around generally in lakes and places that we might find them as fossils. So we're not, these fossils are so old that any animal we know today, we don't find, do we find fossils of like chickens and stuff now? So yeah, we find evidence of kind of like pre-chickens and that sort of thing. We'd find evidence of that. But like going forward, I suspect, especially because like the human angle that we've bred so many more like cows, you know, chickens and that we probably would find a lot more of them.

2:03:57Maybe in a hundred thousand years, they'd be like, bloody hell, there's a lot of chickens and cows. They were the dominant animals on the planet. Well, I've really enjoyed this. Oh, great. This has been so much fun. Is there anything else you want to ask? Is there any chance Jurassic Park could happen? Not in the sense of using amber to kind of extract DNA and stuff. So unfortunately, that process of kind of finding ancient DNA, amber has still gone through that same process. So amber is preserved tree resin, and they capture insects and even sometimes remains of dinosaurs. But even still, if you manage to have kind of blood preserved, it's still gone through the process.

2:04:34You wouldn't have the real DNA. The closest you can come to it is besides having a park full of just birds. maybe like emu and stuff you know big ostriches or something is the closest you could potentially come to it is maybe kind of an idea of like reverse engineering where you could look at say things like chicken embryos and things like that and like modifying the dna and making them grow kind of like jaws with teeth and tails and stuff that that is doable but uh even i know there's like companies that are trying to bring back like the woolly mammoth that like that's never really going to happen it's not going to be a mammoth if you bring something back it's probably going to be a slightly hairier asian elephant or something not a real mammoth and i can't imagine that's good for that animal yeah i think it would pass regulations yeah well that's it yeah exactly yeah yeah what's the ethical side of things that yeah could there be a fossil or like a rock sitting in someone's drawer somewhere right now that could potentially change everything absolutely yeah yeah absolutely and that's that's one of the cool things with being a paleontologist it's not always having to go out to these kind of far-flung locations to find something that might rewrite history there could be a a fossil sitting in a museum here or sitting in somebody's you know garden shed or whatever that they found along the yorkshire coast that might be the first of its kind and it might rewrite history we might say right now that say the first feathered dinosaurs were uh 150 million years old 160 million years it might be that somebody's found a rock from 200 million years ago and they might not know it but they might have evidence of feathers that would rewrite their story of feathers and flight and all that sort of stuff are feathers not confirmed then is it not confirmed that dinosaurs had them then or so it is yeah so it is confirmed but we think like the origins of kind of like feathers based on fossils right now the oldest are about 160 but they must have come from somewhere and so knowing where like the oldest feathers were truly is difficult to kind of pinpoint what you mean but there's a chance that somebody might have found something and they just don't know it might be hidden inside a rock right and you either tap it or scan it or something imagine we found it today imagine that i'm like uh what i'm not even sure if there's a proper question here but do you have any predictions for the next thing the next big change as you said feathers have only been the last what 20 30 years yeah yeah is there anything that you're thinking maybe something will be found i know it's a hard thing to yeah that's yes difficult one to answer that yeah ah it's really hard to tell i suspect because we we're at this point where we're using kind of new technologies and and even in some case not necessarily new technologies but like we've gotten better advancement of like ct scanning and we use like big kind of like tech technological equipment things like synchrotrons which we kind of use like fire like intense beams of light at fossils to understand soft tissues and what they're really made of i suspect within that maybe next 20 30 years maybe there'll be something where we find could be like this fossil of an ammonite you might find a run-of-a-mill fossil and you think oh there's nothing preserved soft tissue structures there but actually i think with the advancement technology you could put that through a scanner i think you'll find soft tissues that we've just overlooked and i think that is where maybe the science of paleo is kind of heading down that route wow i think yeah which is so cool to be to be part of that as well and seeing and living and breathing it in a make-believe world if some if a wizard came to you right now and said dr lomax we're going to let you go back in time but you can only observe one dinosaur for 10 minutes what would you what dinosaur would you choose would it be your your famous uh ichiosaurus that i can't pronounce still ichiosaurus yeah uh you know i'd probably say i'd go back to try and find yeah the ichi titan just because my suggestion is that it was probably 25 26 meters i'd love to go back see that and be like yes i was correct and feel like vindicated and happy or I'd go back and go, oh shit.

2:08:15It's just a massive skull and a tiny body. Damn it. Yeah, that would be it. But I'd love to see that. Love it. I think we did cover this, but proudest moment of your career so far? Proudest moment of my career. It was having the Wii, wasn't it? And watching it and finding it. That's it. Yeah, I reckon it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's up there. If not, then definitely, if I'm allowed to say two, I'd probably say with the ichthyus one aimed after Mary Annink. So finding that as an 18 year old in the museum collection, local museum, the serendipity there, and then naming that after Mary Anning.

2:08:48And then another one, it's a bit random, but with the TV side of things and how I've kind of gotten into that, being able to then kind of call the likes of David Attenborough a friend and being invited by him to have a coffee with him and a screening. And like, it's surreal to, I remember I talked to him actually, so he has held this vertebra, the same vertebra that the two of you have held. He's held that. Wow. And being invited by him and exchanging over the last decade letters with him and just being inspired by him and influenced him as a kid. And then now kind of meeting him a couple of times and working with him in a media capacity has been quite cool.

2:09:23That's amazing. What's he like, just the best? Oh, he's horrible. He is like the nicest guy, so down to earth. And also just, I was just sat there and just listening to him talk. and he held this and he was like he's like this bloody thing dean he said you know growing up in leicestershire i used to hunt for vertebra i never bloody found one of these so they're fantastic and i'm just like what that's amazing i'm just listening to him talk yeah yeah no he's so cool such a lovely gentleman and and yeah yeah voice of a generation of 100 years old now as well yeah still going strong outside of wanting to find bigger than the ichthyotitan yeah is there anything else in your career you still kind of want to achieve anywhere you want to go yeah yeah Yeah, great question.

2:10:07So one of the big things actually, and touching upon with David Attenborough there and TV. So although I kind of worked in TV as a TV host, presenter and behind the scenes, it's still a very difficult area to work in. And it's quite, you guys will probably know as well, like media is always quite cutthroat. And I've worked up ideas over the years where it's like, they're really wonderful ideas. And then they're like, oh yeah, great. Well, we're going to give this to this random celebrity who doesn't give a shit about dinosaurs. Oh yeah. And that sort of thing is really, really tough to kind of stomach and i think going forward i'd love to do more kind of actual like mega adventurous kind of paleontology getting people excited by it kind of going around the world looking at fossils being on digs and doing more tv shows like that i'd love that i know i know you obviously you're a serious paleontologist but how cool would it be the rise of the like the reality show is obviously massive now but you know you know how bear grills will take like eight celebrities on like an expedition yeah i could imagine you taking eight celebrities you know fuck all about dinosaurs.

2:11:05And by the way, if a TV show ever does this, get me and Stevie involved, we want to go with Dr. Lomax, but taking them somewhere and teaching them all about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. I'll tell you, weirdly enough, Jack, that is an idea I thought about for a while. And obviously going back to the connection at the beginning with Slash, so Slash and I have talked about something like that and I'd love to take him, like even literally go to listen to him, Guns N' Roses gig, and I'm like, right, let's go and dig up a dinosaur now. That would be amazing to dig. That would be unreal. Dr. Lomax, it's been a pleasure.

2:11:31where can people keep up to date with you and your career? Yeah, so I'm most active on Instagram and Facebook. And then you might see some of my stuff kind of, I guess, on YouTube and things like that as well. But yeah, look up some of my kind of TV stuff. You can catch up on, I mentioned like Dinosaur Britain, Why Dinosaur, stuff like that. You can find that. YouTube, BBC, PBS and so on. But primarily very active in my adventures as a paleontologist on Insta. What's your handle on? So it's just at Dean R Lomax. Dean R, the letter R. and then Lomax and where can people grab your book? Yeah, so you get Secret Lives of Dinosaurs and other books on Amazon and Waterstones here in the UK but yeah, if you get a copy please leave me a five star review on Amazon it's much appreciated.

2:12:15Love it, love it. Would you sign this copy for us? Yeah, of course I can. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you very much. Guys, I've loved this. Have you? Yeah, it's incredible. So good and we've got a fossil and a book to keep as well. I didn't know I'd be that into fossils and hold it in my hand I genuinely am. So this has been Jack Makes Happy Hour podcast with me, Jack Makes, Stevie White, and the brilliant Dr. Lomax. Dean, we finish with the same question every single episode. What's the meaning of life? The meaning of life to me is about knowledge and it's about exploration, but primarily it's experience.

2:12:48Getting out there to just explore, to meet people and just to share that passion and just kind of just, yeah, to see what discovery is awaiting you out there. And for me as a paleontologist being able to live out my childhood dream and getting outside to explore to dig up new discoveries to start and share that with the public i think that's the meaning of life is to just experience it embrace it all and share that passion with other people your passion is um contagious mate so thank you so much yeah yeah thank you very much

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