In 1982 the late C. Michael (Mike) Bull started a survey of sleepy lizards (Tiliqua rugosa; aka shinglebacks) and their ticks. Unbeknown to Mike at the time, this study was to become one of the longest-running studies of a lizard in the southern hemisphere, and quite possibly the longest running study of wildlife ticks anywhere in the world. During the subsequent 35 years this survey was undertaken by Mike and his research assistant, the late Dale Burzacott. The major discovery uncovered by this survey was long-term monogamy in the sleepy lizard which sparked much subsequent research into lizard sociality. The original question asked by Mike was to understand why there is a boundary between two tick species at this site – a question still largely unresolved. Mike Bull sadly passed away in 2016 and Dale also passed in unrelated circumstances, just three months later. With the sudden departure of the survey’s originator and assistant there was a chance the study would finish. Fortunately, I (Mike Gardner) was around and able to step in and continue the valuable work now in its’ 43rd continuous year. The legacy data associated with the study amounted to over 56,000 individual lizard captures all on hard copy and summarised by a single excel spreadsheet with only some of the data on the sheets encapsulated. Flinders University decided to scan all these sheets to make sure there was a backup. Mike Bull’s son, Simon Bull, had promised his father to help “clean up” the dataset and in a full circle of rare proportions, Simon decided to undertake his PhD to do just that. I will discuss the survey and dataset plus a double entry method developed by Simon to understand if this manually transcribed and curated dataset is a genuine representation of the originally recorded values.