Interview: Hong Kong's dinosaur expert Michael Pittman

I'm half Scottish, half Chinese and I grew up in Hong Kong. Some of my best childhood memories stem from holidays spent with my grandfather in the Highlands of Scotland. He took us walking and fishing and this, along with David Attenborough's amazing documentaries, inspired my love of animals and the great outdoors. I attended ESF schools where we were encouraged to have big dreams. I thought I might become a Formula One driver, a footballer, a musician or … a palaeontologist.

I went to University College London to study geology. I was only 17 when I arrived, so for the first few months I couldn't buy drinks at the student union bar. I took courses in palaeontology and started to realise that, unlike my dream of being a footballer, it wasn't a fantasy career. I stayed on to do a master's degree, and then a PhD, before moving back to Hong Kong in 2013 to take up a position at the University of Hong Kong.

My PhD focused on dinosaur tails. I looked at ankylosaurs and stegosaurs, which have tails ending in fearsome clubs and spikes, and the evolution of carnivorous dinosaur tails. The latter started with big, muscular counter-balancing tails, which reduced in size and changed shape through time, eventually becoming rudders for flying birds. I'm fascinated by the evolution of avian flight - it's one of the really significant events in the history of life.

My first fossil-hunting expedition was to Hebei province, in northern China. The countryside was a bit tame so it didn't satisfy my longing to be an explorer. The following year I went to the Gobi Desert, in Inner Mongolia. That was a huge adventure, and I've returned there every year since.

On my first trip to the Gobi my team found two new species, which was a really big deal at such an early stage in my career. My friend spotted a claw sticking out from a cliff and called me over. We knew straight away that it was a carnivorous dinosaur and we were ecstatic. Once we had dug it out, we realised it was a dromaeosaur. Dromaeosaurs are the small, vicious dinosaurs in the kitchen scene in Jurassic Park and they've been my favourites ever since I saw the film as a kid. It turned out to be one of the most complete dromaeosaur skeletons ever found and has helped us gain a better understanding of these animals, which are closely related to birds. The other new dinosaur we found is related but extremely small, about the size of a parrot. This type - an alvarezsaur - has an extremely strange hand with just one very large finger. Most carnivorous dinosaurs have three fingers; ours is the only one-fingered dinosaur ever discovered.

Every summer I work in the Southern Gobi Basin, an area which is especially rich in dinosaur fossils. The temperature range is vast - it can exceed 50 degrees Celsius at the peak of summer, and gets down to minus 50 degrees Celsius in the winter. These conditions promote rapid weathering of the rocks so every time we visit more rocks have broken down, exposing new fossils.