For me, the moment I stepped out of a truck in the Hell Creek Formation in the badlands of North Dakota a few years ago. My wife and I were on a seven-day fossil dig and by the end of the week my life was changed forever; I knew this was going to be my life's work. In a way it was already as I'd been collecting dinosaur bones at home in the UK for well over a decade, and never grew out of my boyhood live of dinosaurs.

Stepping into the intense heat, dodging rattlesnakes and getting bitten to buggery by deer flies and skeeters didn't mean squat; I loved it all. The smell of sagebrush, the glint of white bone on the gumbo banks . . . that was that. I don't come from an academic family, was in the bottom class at school and university was never even mentioned when I was growing up (except once by one teacher, but that's another story) but now I'm in my late 40's and I'm studying part-time for a PhD and have just had my first paper published.