A new start after 60: I’d had several careers but no degree – then I became a palaeontologist at 62

Munns with (clockwise from bottom left): amethyst crystals, smoky quartz, an ammonite cast, a model of a crystalline mineral lattice, a fossilised ammonite and desert rose gypsum Photograph: Hilary Wardhaugh/The Guardian

Craig Munns has a large model of a T rex on his desk. He got it with a magazine subscription two decades ago. One day, a few years ago, he was sitting in his study, which was dense with books and yellow sticky notes and posters charting evolution from single cells upward, and he thought, “What am I going to do next in my life?” And his eyes lit upon the T rex.

Munns had recently taken on a job at the public library in Canberra, but it had always rankled with him that he had not studied for a degree, starting instead as an electronics trainee after he left school in Sydney, Australia. So he decided to enrol as a part-time student. He graduated at 62, with honours in palaeontology from the University of New England in Armidale, NSW.