Dean Lomax Returns
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Hello and welcome to I Know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries and science with us. I'm Garrett. And I'm Sabrina. And today in our 525th episode, we've got an interview with Dean Lomax, the award-winning paleontologist, author, and presenter, who you may remember from the last time we interviewed him. Or from many of his presentations. It's true.

We also have dinosaur of the day Aristosuchus, a small dinosaur from the early Cretaceous. And we have a fun fact, which is that Sir Arthur Smith Woodward was an accomplished paleontologist with connections to dinosaurs, fossil fish, and one infamous hoax. Yes. And as a reminder, we are

are on parental leave. We are recording this episode early, so we are expecting our second baby very soon. Although by the time this episode airs, she will be here. But it seemed like a good idea to record some episodes ahead of time because we've got a toddler and baby on the way, so...

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If you join at the Triceratops tier or above. Yes, and thank you so, so much to everyone in our Dino It All community. Your support means so much, especially while we're taking some time off to get to know our new little one. And without further ado, we're going to get on to our interview with Dr. Dean Lomax. But of course, as always, we have an extended version of this interview. So if you'd like to check that out, head over to patreon.com slash inodino.

We are joined this week by Dean Lomax, an award-winning paleontologist, author, and presenter, as well as Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester and 1851 Fellow at the University of Bristol. He's the leading authority on ichthyosaurs, and he also excavates and researches dinosaurs. Thank you so much for joining us.

Hey, it's a pleasure to be back on the podcast with you. I think it's been a few years since we last chit-chote. It has been a few years, but I think we've seen each other at least once in between, so it doesn't seem as long as it has been since our last interview. It's true, because we saw you at the Why Dinosaurs Hollywood premiere. Yeah. Absolutely, yeah, the big Hollywood premiere for Why Dinosaurs. No, that was lovely. I'm glad we had a chance to at least briefly chat. It was so busy that evening, but no, that was really nice. I'm pretty sure we got a picture as well, right? I think so, yeah.

We should post that with the show notes somehow or something. Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah, to prove it. We actually met in real life. Well, yeah, you've been up to a lot since last we talked in 2021. I guess since we're talking about why dinosaurs, do you want to talk at all about what that's been like? Oh, yes. And your role. Yeah. No, it's been great fun working with the why dinosaurs group. And I think if I get...

Let me get my bearings. I'm always working in millions of years. So, you know, recent years is difficult to comprehend. Let's think. So probably about five or six years, I think now I've been working with the Y-Dinosaurs team and especially with Tony, Tara and James Pinto and seeing the

the documentary go from strength to strength. I think it's, you know, it's wonderful. And obviously, you know, the two of you have a starring role in it, of course, as well. You know, I really love that sequence. And especially that's the sound. I mean, I mentioned this every time I talk about why dinosaurs, but the soundtrack is fantastic. But the theme that they have when the two of you come on and speak, I really love that. That part of the soundtrack is absolutely lovely, but it's been wonderful seeing the documentary kind of evolve over the last few years and having so many people watch the film and,

Become so excited about it. And you know one of the big things I always say is like the the kind of thing of here Why dinosaurs anyway? The question mark is is the people behind it, you know all the kind of people from various different walks of life and so on who get fascinated by dinosaurs and Prehistoric life. So yeah, it's been great to see that but also obviously the Hollywood premiere there's been a mini UK tour that I orchestrated with with Tony there's been a Canadian premiere as well now

Now, I think there's a variety of kind of screenings going on in the States with more planned, I think, later this year, 2025. So it's going to be really interesting to see how everything evolves with that. Plus, also, I don't know if you are aware of this, but it did get picked up by PBS as well. Yes, I saw. In 2025. Yeah, it's going to go out on PBS, which is fantastic news. And that typically means, like over here in the UK, the BBC often shared documentaries

documentaries and things with the PBS. So hopefully it'll mean it'll come to, comes to BBC here, but yeah, my role obviously on screen as one of the leading experts has been great fun, but also off kind of off screen and behind the scenes as an exec producer has been, you know, great fun of, you know, I bring a wealth of kind of experience in TV and,

I've been a presenter and host and expert and series advisor for a bunch of TV shows. So it's been nice to kind of have that bit of input working very closely with Tony over the years. So yeah, as I say, really, really thrilled and really, really so happy that they've been winning so many awards as well. And everybody that I've heard from genuinely who has watched the film has said it's fantastic, you know, so you couldn't ask for any better feedback, especially from paleo nerds. Oh, yes, yes. Yeah. Well,

One of the things I like about it is like you were saying, the question of why dinosaurs and since we all communicate with the public and then you talk to people and they ask what your job is, they say like, oh, you know, I talk about dinosaurs or ichthyosaurs or whatever. And they're like, why? You're like, that's a job or whatever. And you always have to explain it. It's cool. We should be like, well, there's a documentary.

to just redirect your questions. Honestly, that's so on point as well. The amount of times where I've heard people talking like that or asking a question like, there's a whole documentary now. Go and watch it. Go and watch the documentary. People are into that. Adults like that too. Yeah, there's a whole thing.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. No, I love it. I love it. And it's great. I always say about paleontology generally, and I think we really capture this in the doc too, that you two are fully aware that paleontology is that gateway science, right? You know, I've written about this in some of my books. I've talked about it on social media quite a lot. It really is the gateway science, whether you're a five-year-old or a 95-year-old, everybody can share that kind of special bond for prehistoric life. And I think, yeah, why dinosaurs really helps to encapsulate that passion for paleontology.

Nice. Definitely. And speaking of that gateway to science, because you write a lot of books that are all paleontology. We were just talking about a lot of dinosaurs specifically in there, but of course other things too, like Locked in Time had all those fantastic stories about, still think about the horseshoe crab fossils that we talked about last time. Yeah.

Yeah, that poor horseshoe crab literally died in its tracks, right? You know, 150 million years ago. And it's amazing, really, Sabrina, when I was working on that idea of locked in time, you know, the concept of that, I know we touched upon it when we last spoke. But I was, what, 18 years old when I was volunteering at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center way back in 2008. So I traveled from the U.K.,

raise up enough money. You might remember, I think I mentioned that I'd sold a bunch of like objects, Star Wars action figures and things, you know, still kills me to this day. But, you know, all that sort of stuff to kind of fund, you know, this, this big trip to America to dig up dinosaurs. And I remember just kind of seeing that fossil on the, my very first day volunteering at the museum. And I was just blown away by it. I, you know, it's like you see fossils in books or in documentaries and things like that. And you

usually it's a cool skeleton and it's like oh we think it did this we think it did that and then actually seeing a specimen that has that behavior there preserved just blew my mind and that's

Yeah, that's where that idea came from. And it's been wonderful to also see Locked in Time become a bestseller for Columbia University Press, a bestseller on Amazon and get pretty much five star ratings everywhere, left, right and center. And for somebody who's developed that idea for when I finished writing, I think it was 14, 15 years or something like that, to develop the idea and have so much kind of energy and passion for that and seeing that there's nothing like that out there on the market and the kind of book realms of paleontology or even natural sciences, it's

I was so, yeah, so, so happy to do so well. And again, similarly to why dinosaurs, everybody who I've met in person or said, you know,

said things online or anything about lots of time is always positive. So clearly must be doing something right on that front. Yeah, I enjoyed reading it. And I know you're working on another book right now. Can you tell us a little bit about it? Yeah, I can. So I can't give too much away right now. But all being well, this year, I'll be able to officially announce that

the latest book and it will be out this year as well in 2025. And it's going to be kind of basically, I remember in our conversation from last time that we talked about Locked in Time and that I was like, well, you know, I hope this idea could evolve into something more. And in some ways, this second book is, yeah, and kind of in some ways it's people see it as a sequel to Locked in Time. So anybody listening to this, if you read Locked in Time,

And if you haven't, what have you been playing at? You need to read Locked in Time. So if you're interested in animals, prehistoric animals with direct evidence of behaviors, you've got to read Locked in Time. But if you have, it's kind of a... I'd see it as a primer to this book in that it's more about the direct evidence of behaviors. But this time, it's things that are a lot more kind of extreme evidence or really unusual evidence of behaviors. But it's kind of using the same theme of Locked in Time. But it's going down...

a very interesting path to kind of the story of life as well. And it's, in my opinion, I would probably say, and I'm my own worst critic. So this actually says a lot, but I'd say it's probably my best writing. It's very similar to, I don't know if you saw the book I wrote called dinosaurs, 10 things you should know. It's a very short book. And I was, I really enjoyed writing that book because it's more of my kind of personality. I managed to get in there, which a little bit is in locked in time, of course, as well, but more kind of humor and, and,

kind of the way in which I like to approach paleontology and kind of outreach and that it's you know you want to be serious but at the same time you need to have a little bit of fun with this hey it's paleontology it's cool science it's this sort of thing to you know grab people's interest and so it's kind of more of that writing style so kind of that bridge between locked in time and dinosaurs 10 things you should know and so I'm really yeah really really looking forward to to getting it out there and plus it's I've been working on this for I think now

about two plus years, two and a half years. So it's been a lot of time dedicated to it. And it's currently, and it might change a little bit, but it's sitting around the 80,000 word mark. So it's quite a, quite a tome. That is, I feel like you get a book out almost every year. You know, honestly, I have no life outside of paleontology. I think that's it. Either that or, you know, I've had a few friends be like, Dean,

have you like cloned yourself or something? I'm like, I don't know. Maybe I just don't sleep. That's my problem. I always try to be, you know, working on cool stuff and books. That's how passionate you are about it. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. No, absolutely, Sabrina. And I always say it's the key thing is having that passion and, you know, passion for paleontology is something I've

I've had since I was a little boy, as far back as I can remember. And now I still like to have that childlike fascination and passion for paleontology. So is it safe to say there will be dinosaurs in the new book? Oh, most definitely. Yeah, most definitely. More dinosaurs. There's going to be plenty of dinosaurs in there. Some really cool, exciting stories that I spent a lot of time, you know, in Edece, similarly to Locked in Time, where I kind of

I took a deep dive into the literature to look at many of the common things that you were fully aware of. And any dinosaur nerds listening to this, the people who love the cool fighting dinosaurs, the lost raptor and protoceratops, which of course have made the cover for Locked in Time.

There's that kind of fossil that I've included. So some like quite famous examples, but I've also gone so deep into literature. I found stuff that so few people are aware of. And there's so many cool fossils out there, even more so than from when I was writing Locked in Time that I was surprised myself.

So shifting gears a little bit, you're an 1851 fellow at the University of Bristol. And that has enabled you to do some amazing work with ichthyosaurs. What's that been like? You've already had at least one major discovery. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So basically in 2023, I became...

a research fellow with the University of Bristol and officially an 1851 research fellow. And that effectively means it's for this organisation, fantastic organisation called the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. And each year they award 35 postgraduate fellowships and scholarships throughout that year. And so they're really prestigious fellowships.

And I was really incredibly lucky to manage to get one of these for 2023 and effectively helped to fund my research officially for three years, but it would actually be for four years. I've taken one year part-time, the other year part-time. And the focus of the research is to look at ichthyosaurs at the very end of the Triassic period and right at the beginning of the early Jurassic period, primarily from the early Jurassic, and to understand if there was...

uh major extinction event at the end of the triacet that wiped out like lots of ichthyosaurs and how they quickly rebounded or basically how quick they rebounded whether it took a few thousand years you know hundreds of thousands years a few million years and stuff and so it's kind of looking at that and it's applying it to kind of certain like modern extinctions and things too and making it quite relevant to kind of what we're seeing in the oceans today with climate change and things like that and how that's affecting marine mammals and so on and all of that is then combined with

really cool fossils. So things like, you know, really cool soft tissue fossils of ichthyosaurs. So we're currently working on an epic fossil that was found actually quite a few years ago, but nobody's actually worked on it until me and the rest of my team have been working on it of soft tissues of an ichthyosaur that nobody's ever seen before. Like that's really, really epic. And we're working on a cool research paper on that, but we're also working on, you must've seen, I think

We may even have talked about it, or maybe it came after our conversation, but you must have seen the picture of me laying down on the job next to that giant Rutland sea dragon, right? Yeah, yeah. So that's also part of the fellowship too. So kind of as a recap for listeners there, so what became known as the Rutland sea dragon is an ichthyosaur from a place called Rutland in the Midlands here in the UK. And that's kind of like the northeast of...

of London by a couple of hours drive. And basically, Rutland is virtually unknown for big vertebrate fossils. It's really, really rare. And randomly, a chap called Joe Davis was working at the Rutland Water Nature Reserve, and he happened to find some giant vertebrae, giant bones that were about sort of 12, 15 centimeters across. And lo and behold, quick kind of, you know, in a nutshell,

it turns out that he discovered what became a 10 meter long complete skeleton from the very tip of the snout to the end of the tail. And that is genuinely the most complete skeleton of any large prehistoric reptile ever found in the UK. And I led the excavation of this. And so, you know, to be kind of part of that,

Long line of discovery in the UK, as you know, from going back to Mary Anning 200 plus years ago and all the discoveries in between a megalosaurus of baryonyx and things. And then right up to now the Rutland sea dragon to let the excavation and collect that what became the most complete skeleton of any large piece of reptiles and pretty cool. So that's part of it as well.

And then kind of alluding to what you said as well there, Sabrina, is the kind of latest big discovery of mine, which is also part of the 1851 research, is looking at our gigantic latest Triassic ichthyosaur called Ichthyotitan sevenensis that me and my team, we named back in 2024. So that was a really cool discovery. And I was really thrilled that it gained so much attention around the world. It seemed to be everywhere in terms of

news outlets and TV and radio. So we were really thrilled for that. I remember all the paleo art that were highly speculative paleo art that people were going nuts over. Just like big old whale size. Some of them were extremely puffy. Other ones were a lot more streamlined. I think it really captures the imagination when you find a bone from something that you can tell was huge.

but you can't really see that much of the skeleton. Your mind just goes wild with all the possibilities of what the animal could have looked like.

Honestly, Garrett. Yeah, exactly. And that was kind of the case of our research too, because kind of the mini short of that story is back in 2016, there was a good friend of mine and fossil collector and amateur paleontologist called Paul de la Salle, who found this giant jawbone, a meter long, part of a bone called a serangula. And it was only, you know, probably less than half complete. And that's a meter. And that's a jawbone. Obviously, it's mad. And they have

I'm seeing reptiles, it's different bones that make up the lower jaw. And this is just one incomplete. And Paul found that. And then we actually described that in 2018 in Plus One. And we were like, you know, maybe there's going to be more out there. We looked at other material. We re-identified some other bones.

giant jaw bones, but we didn't have that much, but it was really cool. And then all of a sudden in 2020, I received this email from father and daughter fossil collecting duo, Justin and Ruby Reynolds, who they'd been out on the beach. And I should say Ruby was only 11 years old and legitimately Ruby found this giant chunk of bone and

And then her dad found another piece as well, independently kind of looked it up online. Like, Oh, what could it be? Found our paper, found my email, sent me an email with these pictures saying, Hey, Dr. Lomax, we've, you know, we found these, uh, these bones and we think they might be another one of your serangulars. And I was like, you're right. They are. That is, that's literally another serangular. But this time I got, you know, I got so excited because

It was twice as complete as Paul's specimen. So this time, you know, once we actually, because I went to the site as well and Paul did too, and we managed to go multiple times and especially Justin Ruby and their family and Paul and his partner, Carol and their family that, you know, and it was just amazing to kind of find more of it. And altogether that bone was about complexion.

complete, we've still missed a few bits, but altogether is about 2.3 meters. And again, that's just one bone. If you add the other bones to that, you know, the dentary and stuff like that, you're talking an animal with a skull of probably four to five meters potentially.

And this is a case of, we know they get big because you've got Shonisaurus sicaniensis from British Columbia, which has a skeletal length of 21 meters. So we know ichthyosaurs have become truly enormous. And at least based on our very basic scaling, it works out that comparing the serangular bone with the same bone of Shonisaurus sicaniensis ours is about 25% larger, which puts it on that order of magnitude of kind of 25 plus meters.

So, you know, we may even have tantalizing tiny, I say tiny, sort of smaller bits, but much bigger elements of other giant serangulas that may actually belong to animals even bigger than that. And, you know, we always have to think that so far we've only got two specimens and, you know, that might just be the average for that species. It's like blue whales. We've got lots of blue whales. I think the average puts them at about, is it 20, somewhere like 24 meters, 26 meter average. But you have that outlier of like the biggest on record, longest on record, I think it's 33 meters. So, yeah.

you know, that's an outlier. So who's to say these ichthyosaurs, you know, they could well have been over 30 meters. I'm confident that they would have been. And it's just difficult at the moment because you don't have those complete skeletons, but at least we have Sucaniensis to compare with at 21 meters. So, you know, it's exciting stuff as well because it does mean it's worthwhile pointing out that when we were looking at whether we give this thing a name, because I was actually really hesitant because we only have two specimens, two incomplete serangulas. But the fact that it's,

from a specific formation at the very end of the Triassic that is virtually unknown for ichthyosaurs. The next kind of like large ichthyosaurs with a name are about 13 million years in the past. And we don't have any of these giant ichthyosaurs going forward.

In addition, we had two specimens that come from nearby in the same formation along the coastline. It was kind of a no-brainer that we have something unique. Plus, in addition, the morphology, so the shapes of the serangula is distinctly different from what we know of other giant serangulas. Yeah. We were confident. So I just got to hope and keep our fingers crossed that in the future we'll find a full skull and maybe a skeleton, but maybe I'm just overdoing that too much. But you never know. You never know. You never know. Yeah.

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And now back to our interview with Dean. You know, and one of the cool things with, I mean, this is science, right? Of course, it might well be if we ever do have that giant skull or if we're very lucky to have a skeleton, you know, maybe it turns out that actually it's not 25 plus meters. Maybe it's, you know, 15, 20 meters. Then great. You know, that's fantastic. Science progresses. And this is one of the things I've always held my hands up in all the interviews I've done about it. You know, the live stuff when it came out and even in the original press release.

We were kind of like, well, you know, we're not arm waving here. The very basic, simple scaling comparing with what we've got, the Shonisaurus sicaniensis from British Columbia. We know that we have 21 meter animals. What we didn't want to do is we'll probably both be familiar with that famous thing from the original walk with dinosaurs, right? The whole, was it 25 meter live pluridon or something?

And so it's that sort of thing. And it was like, oh, you know, we don't want to do that and put it out there. At least we know ichthyosaurs got over 20 meters long. And so there's a good chance based on the simple scaling that this animal probably was about that length, you know, 25-ish meters and probably got larger than that, you know, enormous beasts. And, you know, challenging also, I should say, challenging the blue whale in theory is at least the longest animal potentially ever. Obviously, there's some sauropods up there too. Yes. Yes.

yeah one of my first thoughts with that was like oh i was a little disappointed almost because i was like i always tell people like how amazing it is that we live with the largest animal ever to live but if ichthyotitan ends up being bigger that'll be like ah so close yeah right i mean i still do the same thing too you know and i'm always like well on solid grounds we know the blue whale is still the you know is the longest but there's a chance you've got ichthyotitan or maybe one of these big

big sauropods like Argentinosaurus, Sepatica Titan or something's up there too. But it's nice. I kind of think they're all sort of neck and neck kind of thing. But yeah, you know, the fossil record, it's so incomplete. We always, it's that famous thing of we need more fossils and genuinely it always is. Yeah. And we may never know how big the biggest individual was. Yeah.

Absolutely. I know you didn't give a weight estimate, but do you think, but weight wise, do you think a whale or an ichthyosaur, like a similar length is a ichthyosaur lighter? Or do you think a whale is lighter? Oh yeah. So, so this is, this is one of the things that kind of me and the team, we spoke about. And because we were, we're only dealing with the two incomplete kind of serangulas and even obviously comparing it to the Saganiansis, I was just like, you know what?

We don't need to go down that route of weight and stuff like that. I think we'll take it. I'll go too far. But we did talk about it. And kind of in short, to answer your question, we'd almost definitely say that the whale is going to be the heaviest. Yeah. Yeah. By a long shot, we would imagine. I think there was some estimates, although I think it's recently been challenged. I think it was Shonisaurus acaniensis that like,

70, 80 tons or something, I think. But again, these kind of estimates that go from one extreme to the other. So one paper might come out saying, hey, it's actually 30 tons and then five years down the line, it's 150 tons. And so it's really hard to get a good handle on it, especially when you don't have things that are that complete or you don't have many specimens of them. Yeah. I would say, yeah, blue whale dome, I would say would be the heaviest. Okay. Well, then I can feel better because usually when we talk about biggest, I go like, let's go by mass.

because it's like lengths you could have a sore pie with like 40 foot long tail that's like so thin and like does that even count yeah precisely i have to be so careful with it too because of my like my common default is just to go back to biggest but by biggest i actually i'm when i'm talking about it i mean in length and i'm just like oh i mean length like it's the longest you know potentially the longest because when i say biggest as you say like you think oh heaviest and stuff too so yeah i was recently filming for a tv show that is meant to be

out at some point. And that was kind of partly including Icthyotitan in that research. And so I remember comparing to blue whales and kept kind of saying, yeah, biggest and said, oh, no, sorry. You know, let me redo that again. Longest, potentially. Yeah, you got to be precise. People ask that all the time. They'll say, what was the biggest dinosaur? And we're like, well, there's this one, which was the tallest. There's this one that's the longest. This one that might have been the heaviest.

It just depends. It's like, so, you know, it could be this, it could be that. I always think, and I have thought about this a little bit, I've kind of banked it in the back of my mind at some point, but I've given two TED Talks now and I've always banked for the back of my mind to do a TED Talk. If I ever do it again...

if anybody listens to this and they're involved in TED, please don't reach out to me because after doing two TED Talks, I decided I would never do another one again because it was so stressful. I loved it, but it was so stressful because it was just like you had to be so on it and like so perfect, your timing and everything. So I was like, right,

not going to do another one, but, but if I ever did another TED talk, I always kind of had in the back of my mind, it would be something like the biggest animal ever. And then quantifying it kind of like tallest, you know, longest, heaviest. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe, maybe next year, hopefully not.

One of these years. Maybe, maybe. Going back to ichthyosaurs, before we were talking, actually, I was thinking it was so interesting because obviously we talk about dinosaurs more, but with ichthyosaurs, it seems like you learn a lot just from the jawbones compared to dinosaurs where, I guess it depends on the type of dinosaur, like ankylosaur, but the heads, the skulls matter more, but then other different groups, it depends on what you're looking for. But

It makes sense after talking to you, though, that you would know so much because the jawbone would tell you the size of the skull, which would give you an idea of the body and everything. But it's just so fascinating because I think that's why you do the histology with ichthyosaurs, right, too, is the jawbones. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And histology, what we...

What we did with Ixia Titan in particular, we took some histological sections. I should say this was Marcello Perillo who did this, who was a master's student at the University of Bonn in Germany. And he's been doing some really cool cutting edge work. And he actually publishes, I think it was his master's. And then he did this research with me as well. It was kind of like grew out of his master's. And so by sampling...

the holotype specimen and the referred specimen ie paul specimen that the referred one and then other other bones of other giant ichthyosaurs and other things he just found some really phenomenal stuff that for our giant jaw bones it shows that this animal was still growing at the time of death and potentially that it was there's kind of like a you know like a

not necessarily a teenager, but kind of that age range, teenager slash early adult kind of bracket. Of course, you know, reptiles, generally speaking, kind of like constantly grow throughout their lives, but they slow down. And so it shows that ours was not slowing down as it were. And so, you know, maybe...

I wouldn't say it was a baby, but it shows that they had this unusual growth rate, but also it showed that they have a really strange histology too. So yeah, you can learn quite a lot from them, from slicing into the jawbones. And in terms of ichthyosaurs generally too, it's worth touching on, because you say that Sabrina, what you say is a really good

point and so you know i often get as you can imagine i mean not obviously i you know i'm obviously an expert on ichthyosaurs but i obviously we were talking about before i work on dinosaurs plesiosaurs eurypterids ammonites fossil plants and all sorts of things over my career but but ichthyosaurs is kind of my one true love as it were and so i get lots of people reaching out about oh hey you know dr lomax could i help you know could you help me with this fossil and that fossil but usually it's ichthyosaur related things and people sometimes will reach out

They may have found, if they're lucky, they may have found either a skull or if they're even luckier, they may have found a skeleton. But if that skeleton and that skull isn't preserved in the kind of right dimension, usually you need it in a lateral view and you'll need an exposure of say the skull roof as well. And you'll definitely need a flipper. So you'll need the forefin and probably ideally the hindfin and the

pelvic girdle. If some of those things are missing, I can probably tell you it's this genus, but we're not sure if it's this species. It's really difficult. And so like the schools are primarily, that's where a lot of the work's done taxonomically. And so some of the species I've named, which is a victious, I've named six species, including Icthia titans.

of ichthyosaurs and all of them pretty much although there's characters in the humerus so the upper arm bone of the flippers and some stuff in the hind fins as well a little bit of things in the pelvis primarily the key characters the key features are always in the skull so to have a really well preserved good

good skull is, is quite important, which is kind of feeds in nicely to, we talked about at Rutland Sea Dragon. That's a big part of the 1851 research fellowship. And we are at the stage now where that picture of me lying down, you know, we're going to clean all that stuff. Well, that's if it's being cleaned, then what we're going to do, we're going to flip the entire skeleton over and we're going to look at the underside because when that animal came to rest, it

that underside was protected from scavengers, from the elements and everything else in between to the point that when we flip it over, keeping my fingers well and truly crossed, that should be the best preserved side. And if I'm correct and right, and I've gone down in history and saying this a couple of times, and so I hope I'm going to be right.

we should have a beautiful skull with a long jaws with a set of beautiful teeth in there and hopefully a massive football or soccer ball sized eye, a sclerotic ring, you know, preserved too. So it should all be there. And I've spent so much time comparing

How it's preserved, how he's seen it at the moment, which kind of looks like Jurassic roadkill, a skull's kind of squished on itself. But how it looks on that side is very similar to a lot of very famous ichthyosaurs from the UK, but also from Germany, a place called Holzmarten. You might be familiar with the Posidonia shale or Posidonia shifa formation. And on the backside of many of these beautiful skeletons, they're often like a mishmash and mangle, that roadkill kind of effect. And so in reality, we should have a really beautiful skull. So if we flip it and we don't, I'm going to be deeply disappointed.

deeply disappointed. Well, it sounds like there's a good chance. There's a good chance. Yeah. Yeah. And all being well, once we can then look at the skull in detail, go into your point, we should then be able to work out if we've got the good, a good preservation of the skull and all the kind of bones around the eye socket, the nostril and the brain case and stuff, we should be able to work out what species it is. So yeah, exciting stuff. That's exciting. So is that in a lab right now or where is it being worked on?

Yeah, so it's currently, how do they phrase it over here? It's in the BBC. They kind of pick it up quite a bit. They call it, if Nigel Larkin listens to this and he led on the conservation side of things at the dig, he's probably going to say, no, you've got it wrong. But basically it's called the secret Shropshire base, something like that. And that's where it's kind of stored at the moment. So it's in a big laboratory kind of facility that Nigel Larkin owns.

he's a well-known conservator paleontologist and preparator probably in my opinion the best kind of preparator conservator in the uk he's worked on a whole load of projects over the years and so he helped to excavate the specimen he led on that kind of the cleaning kind of phase on site and kind of making sure between the two of us we got it plaster jacketed and taken out the ground properly and so he's leading on the cleaning and so

And effectively, it's been already over three years since we excavated it. But because it's so big and it's kind of lack of funds to find a home for the specimen, because it's going to hopefully go back to Rutland. And we still need to iron out those details. But it's taken so much time to get to the point to get the funding and then put...

pull together funding for displays and stuff. Because you often know yourselves, you see a skeleton in a museum, you're like, oh, cool. But you don't quite appreciate all the work that's gone in behind that, the cleaning, the public engagement.

the panels for the display, all that sort of stuff. So yeah, it's all that jazz that we're dealing with and it should be wrapped up, at least the cleaning, by October 2026. Okay. For such a huge fossil, that's pretty quick. It is, yeah. So Nigel, if you're listening, hurry up, please. LAUGHTER

Is the Icthyotitan, can that be seen anywhere? It can, yeah. So we actually had a mini unveiling of Icthyotitan with Justin and Ruby and Paul actually at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. So we put the fossils on display and we displayed them alongside some of the other bones we mentioned in that

paper, which are what we refer to as the Oost bones, or which for some weird reason have become known on social media as the Oost Colossus. And people seem to run with that. They know what it means. So basically the Oost Colossus or the Oost bones belong, again, another chunks of giant

ichthyosaur jaw bones that were at one point thought to be either a humerus or a femur from a sauropod or a stegosaur, but actually they are definitely jaw bones of an ichthyosaur. So they're on display together. And when you see them, one, you realize just how massive the serangulas really are, but also these horse bones are

the same bone in Justin and Ruby and Paul's, it's about 30% larger. Like it is enormous. You're talking nearly 30 centimeters across. It's massive. So again, the scaling, basic scaling and stuff, you know, maybe this ends up being that it's a giant skulldictius or with a tiny body. Yeah. Like dunkelastius. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, you know, maybe it could be something, something like that, but we'll, we'll see. But yeah, you can see them at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. Cool. Well, for our listeners, if they want to keep up to date with what you're working on, where's the best place that they can go to find out more about you and your work?

I would say definitely you could check out my social media. So Instagram and Facebook simply at Dinar Lomax. I am on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it nowadays, but I am on there too, but not as kind of frequent as I am on Instagram and Twitter. And then in terms of if you want to check out some of my events and books and things, you could visit my website too, which is just simply dinarlomax.co.uk.

Nice. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us. It's always good to catch up. Oh, I had a blast. It's always so much fun chatting to you both. And it's really nice to say since we obviously physically met in person in Hollywood. So I feel like I know you a little bit more now. And so I really enjoyed this chat and look forward to listening to it.

Thanks again, Dean, for the fantastic interview. It's always impressive to hear all the things that you're up to. Yes, and always fun to chat. Yeah, we're always talking a lot before and after the recording starts too. And this was no exception to that, even though Dean was just getting back from a long distance trip and we just got going. We can't help it. We did. So thank you, Dean.

We'll get into our Dinosaur of the Day Aristosuchus in just a moment, but first we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors. And now on to our Dinosaur of the Day Aristosuchus, a request from PaleoMike716 via our Patreon and Discord, so thank you. Could also be Aristosuchus, Sucas.

However you want to do that. Crocodile suffix. Good point. So Aristosuchus, or Aristosuchus, was a Salurosaurian dinosaur that lived in the early Cretaceous in what is now England, found in the Wealdon group. It had a lot of bird characteristics. It looked similar to Compsognathus, or also known as Compies. It was small and carnivorous. It walked on two legs. It had shorter arms and a long tail. It was probably feathered or fuzzy.

And it's estimated to be about 6.6 feet or 2 meters long and weigh 66 pounds or 30 kilograms. That is small, although pretty big compared to a Compsognathus. True. The holotype of Aristosuchus includes parts of the hip, a femur, and a few vertebrae. Parts of the feet have been found too, possibly from the same animal, and then if that's the case, it would show it had long claws. And it lived in an area with floodplains and rivers.

The type species is Aristosuchus pusillus. The genus name Aristosuchus or Aristosuchus means bravest, best, or noblest crocodile. Oh, wow. That is lofty for such a small animal. Yeah.

And the species name, you know, it's not too lofty. Pusillus means small in Latin. This is the king of the smalls. Is this another small king going on? Oh, maybe. It was described in 1876 by Richard Owen. Originally, though, it was named Pochilopleuron pusillus. Richard Owen at first thought that Pochilopleuron was a crocodilian. If you want to refresh your Pochilopleuron, that was our dinosaur of the day back in episode 418. Yeah.

Just real quick, it was a theropod. It lived in the Jurassic with long arms. It was found in what's now France.

Owen thought that Aristosuchus was pocypluron based on having a really large cavity in the middle of the vertebrae. But then it got renamed to Aristosuchus by Harry Seeley in 1887, and it was the first small theropod found in its area. It was actually found back in 1866. There's a lot of confusion between pocylopuron, pusillus, or Aristosuchus.

Aristosuchus, and another dinosaur, Calamospondylus, a theropod that lived in the early Cretaceous. In 1890, Woodward and Sherburn thought that it was the same specimen as Calamospondylus owenii.

That one was named by Reverend William Fox in 1866. But then after that discovery, a lot of small theropods were found. In 1985, Norman found that Aristosuchus, Calamasaurus, Calamospondylus, Thecosalurus, and Thecospondylus were all the same, and he classified them as Aristosuchus.

Then in 2002, Darnache found that Calamospondylus was named from a different specimen and not the same specimen that Poquilopleron was named from, based on letters between Richard Owen and Reverend Fox. So what happened? Well, the name Calamospondylus has been problematic because there wasn't much to the description and of where it was published. It gets more confusing because it's thought that the holotype was the same as the holotype for Aristosuchus.

Fox first published on Calamus Bondylus back in 1866 in the Athenium. It's a magazine and informal publication. And he alluded to the name Calamus Bondylus, but he didn't outright write it in a letter to Richard Owen that dates from 1866. Now, technically, it fits the requirements to be a valid name. So Naish accepted it as valid and not a nomum nudum, as many others in the past had seen it.

Fox's article was also published in the Geological Magazine in the same year, which led to more confusion. Fox named the species Owenii, which apparently Richard Owen approved. And that makes it unlikely that Owen's Pochiloploron pusillus was a renaming of Calamospondylus owenii. Why would he take away that name?

However, later authors assumed that whatever Fox named was re-described by Owen in 1876. But then again, Fox thought the fossils were from a dinosaur, which is different from Owen thinking they were from a crocodilian. It's possible that Fox found both specimens, and both were mostly hip bones, and he started writing letters to Owen, and then Owen described the second one as Pochilopleron pusillus.

That seems to be the case in a couple of letters that Fox wrote, though it doesn't mention specimen number, so it's hard to know. Though he does describe the bones and alludes to the name Calamospondylus and honors Owen with the species name. The type specimen of Calamospondylus oweni, unfortunately, is now lost. However, Nash found, based on the description, that it had no unique features, so it's a nomodubium, though not a nomoneutum. As for Pochilopleron pusillus slash Aristosuchus,

Seeley recognized the fossils were from a dinosaur, not a crocodile, and identified it as a theropod. And then Naish found that it was probably a compsignathid and similar to compsignathus. Although, are compsignathids real? We're going to discuss that in a future bonus episode on our Patreon. It's like a teaser. Mm-hmm. Another reason to join.

And our fun fact of the day ties together lots of different people, which you talked about in the dinosaur of the day. Oh, fun. And that tie is through Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, who was just in all sorts of different places, knew tons of people.

Most of his research was focused on fossilized fish or paleoichthyology. I don't think he ever worked on ichthyosaurs. I was trying to tie that piece in too with our interview with Dean Lomax, but I couldn't confirm that anywhere. He did collect fossils for the Natural History Museum in London for quite a while, so I suspect he probably got his hands on some ichthyosaur fossils.

But I couldn't confirm that, unfortunately. Otherwise, I really would have tied everything together. It would make sense, though. Yes. So Arthur Smith Woodward was friends slash colleagues with Harry Seeley, who you just mentioned in the Dinosaur of the Day. And he eventually married Seeley's daughter, Maud, in 1894.

For the record, Sealy was 25 years older than Woodward, so it wasn't anything weird, as it may sound, marrying your co-worker's daughter. He was a much older co-worker in this case. Harry Sealy is the man who figured out the two major dinosaur groups that we've been using for well over 100 years, meaning Ornithischia and Saurischia. Also named Aristosuchus. Mm-hmm.

Harry Seeley also worked at the Woodwardian Museum, named after John Woodward, although I don't think John Woodward had any kids, and I couldn't find a relationship between John Woodward and Arthur Woodward, but I thought that would be funny. It was sort of like this weird circle that sometimes happens. That would be, but maybe it's just a common name. I think it is a pretty common name, actually, because I was looking up, trying to find John Woodward's genealogy to see if

Arthur Woodward is in the list. And there were so many Woodwards that I kept finding all these family trees, even from the 1600s, which is when John Woodward was alive that eventually I gave up. But Woodward, meaning Arthur Woodward, spent a lot of time traveling around the world, visiting collections, and he knew a huge number of scientists personally. His wife, Maude, went with him on many of his travels around the world. And a lot of times when they would visit England, they would

those scientists would visit them at their house and mod who's usually listed as lady smith woodward confusingly it took me a while to find out what her actual human name was her first name she collected their signatures on a tablecloth oh that's fun yeah it's often called a tea cloth but i've learned that that is a just specific type of tablecloth it's not like a

tea towel, which makes sense because the tablecloth includes 342 signatures from 331 people, which would be an amazing number to fit on a tea cloth. Yes. But on a tablecloth, it seems doable. I guess there's some duplicates, which is why there's 11 more signatures than there are people that signed it.

The way it would work is the people would actually sign on the tablecloth and then Maude would go over their signatures with embroidery so that she could make it more permanent. And she also did it in different colors. Oh, cool. So it looks really neat. We have a color picture of the full tablecloth that we'll put on our Discord server if anyone wants to see it.

The signatures are actually arranged on the tablecloth into four corners of different specialties. By far, the most dense corners are those for geology and paleontology. I don't even know what the other two corners are for, but they're mostly emptied. Apparently, they were his interests early in his career.

Maybe throughout his career, he just didn't do as much work or know as many people in those fields. But there are a lot of really famous signatures on the tablecloth. A couple of the more famous ones and people we talk about all the time are O.C. Marsh, Henry Fairfield Osborne, Romer, Simpson, and Goodrich. And after Arthur Woodward passed away, Lady Woodward gave the tablecloth to George Gaylord Simpson while he was working at the American Museum of Natural History.

Some accounts say the tablecloth was first offered to the Natural History Museum in London, but they declined to take it. And so it ended up going to the American Museum of Natural History. But eventually it ended up going to the Natural History Museum in London in the 1970s. So it made its way back eventually. Makes sense. In terms of his career, Sir Arthur Smith Woodward named lots of animals, including...

Jenny Odectes in 1901. That's a large ceratosaur from Argentina whose name means jaw bite. It was our dinosaur of the day in episode 318. So he didn't just do fish. He also did things with dinosaurs.

It's known from the front roughly half of the upper and lower jaws, which are jammed full of big sharp teeth. The estimate is it was about 20 feet or 6 meters long and weighed under 1 ton, but that is based on jaws, so that estimate is pretty irrelevant. But it gives you a rough idea that it was a fairly big theropod. Mm-hmm.

In that Dinosaur of the Day, you pulled a great quote from Arthur. It was that, quote, all of these teeth are much broken, end quote. That is a good quote. And a lot of the teeth do look like they were in about 20 pieces. So putting that back together was quite a task.

After reconstruction, though, it's amazing how big the teeth are in those jaws and just how many of them were packed close together. In fact, that's one of the things that makes it a unique dinosaur is that there are so many teeth in the premaxilla and they're all quite large.

When it was named back in 1901, it was only the second non-avian dinosaur named from anywhere in South America. And despite being only two partial jaws, it was the most complete theropod from South America for over 70 years. They needed more paleontologists. They did. Or more people traveling around like he did.

Some people have considered geneodectes to be invalid, but Oliver Rauhut did a redescription in 2004 and considered it to be valid. He said, quote, it can currently be distinguished from all other theropods and thus should be considered a valid taxon despite the poor preservation of the holotype. However, determining its systematic position is much more problematic.

Need more fossils to figure that out. Yeah. So we can tell it's valid and that it's a unique genus, but we can't really tell anything else about it other than it's probably a ceratosaur. There's also a dinosaur named after Woodward. It's Walgettasuchus woodwardi.

Speaking of succuses, that was our dinosaur of the day in episode 484. It's a theropod known only from one tailbone. But a really pretty tailbone. It is because that's an opalized one from the Lightning Ridge in Australia. So you can tell this is in the turn of the 20th century, 19th to 20th century. And he's naming stuff from South America and Australia as well as Europe. He clearly had a lot of connections around the world. Mm-hmm.

This fossil was mailed to him while he was working at the Natural History Museum in London.

And he described the fossil in 1909, although he exercised restraint. And when he described it, he didn't name a new genus or species because it was just the one vertebra. I guess it was past the bone wars time. It was just barely. But when Friedrich von Hune looked at it about 20 years later in 1932, he did give it a name. That's where it got the name Walgettusicus woodwardi.

But now it is generally considered to be too similar to other theropod tailbones to warrant its own name, which means Arthur Woodward was probably right not to name it in the first place. Another case of need more fossils. I just love saying that.

Unfortunately, though, Arthur Woodward's legacy was seriously tarnished because of his association with the Piltdown Man. I know you mentioned the Piltdown Man a few weeks ago. Basically, it was a hoax set of ape remains from three different species combined to look like a missing link between apes and humans. For example, pieces of orangutan and pieces of human combined into one fossil. But it was really convincing. It convinced tons of people and

It stood as a question mark about whether or not it was a hoax for decades before it was definitively proven to be a hoax. And also, there are many missing links that show the connection between apes and humans. So it's not out of the question that this would have been one of them. It's just that it turned out Piltown Man was a fake.

Weirdly, the man that has been identified as the origin of the hoax, Charles Dawson, has a dinosaur named after him. Oh, interesting. The dinosaur is Beryllium Dawsoni, previously known as Iguanodon Dawsoni. Charles Dawson also signed that tablecloth. But basically what happened is with Piltown Man, Charles Dawson brought the hoax set of bones to Woodward while he was at the Natural History Museum in London and

And then Woodward names the fossils Eo Anthropos Dawsoni, which means Dawson's Dawn Man.

The fossils were almost immediately met with skepticism, including by surgeons and others that were more knowledgeable about ape bones. But Woodward wasn't the only one fooled. In 1921, Henry Fairfield Osborne from the American Museum of Natural History looked at the fossils and said that they belong together, quote, without question. Wow. So he was definitely convinced. It's kind of funny that it's two of the curators of some of the largest museums.

It took until 1953 when the bones were finally definitively demonstrated to be a hoax. That was long after Dawson and about nine years after Woodward had passed away. So I guess fortunately for Woodward, he wasn't living with this tarnished reputation completely, even though a lot of people did think it was a fake, but wasn't definitively a fake while he was alive. But the Piltdown Man was by far the most

famous quote-unquote discovery that Woodward was ever involved with. There was even a painting of him and Dawson as well as others which shows them sort of around the skull examining it almost like a renaissance piece of art and that was commissioned to go with an exhibit of Piltdown Man and really no one wants their mistakes immortalized in a popular painting. Apparently the lithographs of that painting are

Very good selling, even to this day, which is kind of a bummer. It's literally like him describing this thing, which was a mistake. Yes, it is a bummer for Woodward. Yes, but there's a happy ending. In 2016, what would have been Woodward's 150th birthday was celebrated at the Natural History Museum in London.

He spent his entire career working there from 1882 to 1924, 42 years. He started when he was 18 and then raised the ranks up to the Keeper of Geology, basically the curator. And he was actually the longest serving Keeper of Geology in the museum's history.

So to coincide with his 150th birthday, they did a symposium about his contributions to science, which included over 700 publications, and some of his discoveries were very impactful.

For example, he named Mawsonia gigas in 1907. And from that name, you can guess that it was very large. It's about 5.3 meters or 17 feet long, but it wasn't a dinosaur. It was a huge coelacanth that lived in the late Jurassic to Cretaceous and has been found both in the Americas and Africa and has been used to show plate tectonics from the spreading between Brazil to Africa. Oh, that's cool and fitting.

For him who named so many animals from around the world. That's true. Yeah. So he's a really interesting person and connects to so many different paleontologists who we've talked about over the years. And only after really getting into this did I discover that they actually all signed this tablecloth that him and his wife.

put together. And it's also just cool that it seems that him and his wife really shared a love for science because they would travel around. They both clearly enjoyed hosting different scientists at their house. A husband and wife team with a very nice memento. Yeah. And she stopped collecting signatures when he passed away, which I think is kind of sad.

Sweet, but also sad. On that bittersweet note, that wraps up this episode of I Know Dino. Thank you for listening. Stay tuned in our next episode. We're going to talk all about why Brontosaurus is the best dinosaur. Oh, good. I can't wait. Yes, me either. And if you want to get even more paleo content, especially when we're out for parental leave, then please consider joining our Dino It All community at patreon.com slash I Know Dino.

Thanks again, and until next time.

If you want to help us reach our goal and also help us continue to make the podcast, please head over to patreon.com slash inodino. Again, that's patreon.com slash inodino. And a huge thank you to everyone who joins and has joined.