Lyme Regis- On the Road in the UK, Part Two

WARNING: This region is dangerous, with rock falls and land slips occurring regularly. Any visit to the area must be done so with caution!

Running along the southern edge of England is the Jurassic Coast, made up of cliffs and beaches spanning the entire Mesozoic area, is one of the world’s most famous fossil landscapes. It is also home to possibly the world’s most famous tongue twister.

‘She sells seashells on the seashore

 The shells she sells are seashells, I'm sure

 So if she sells seashells on the seashore

 Then I'm sure she sells seashore shells.’

Produced by Terry Sullivan in 1908, this familiar construct describes how Mary Anning sold the sea shells she’d collected along the early Jurassic Blue Lias cliffs of the region, and is an odd little account of the origins of the modern science of palaeontology. Mary had grown up in a poor family, so to make money the young girl had begun selling the fossil shells she collected along the local shoreline. The Napoleonic war had stopped England’s gentry from travelling to the continent, forcing the rich to holiday in local rural regions.

The business was a dangerous one and Mary was nearly killed in 1833 during the landslide that took the life of her dog. Her efforts soon bore fruit when she began discovering more than just the spiral form of ammonite shells.  Mary soon unearthed the world’s first ichthyosaur skeleton, along with plesiosaurs and even a pterosaur- the first known outside of Germany. These were all purchased, and many can still be seen today in London’s Natural History Museum (NHM). Even today Lyme Regis is a source of many fine monsters from the Jurassic seas.


Duria Antiquior- note all the poo- Coprolites were a common fossil studied at the time.

Mary Anning would also be associated with the world’s first image of a prehistoric landscape. The ‘Duria Antiquior’ was a watercolour painted by the English geologist, Henry De la Beche, in 1830. It was based on many of the creatures from the ancient seas of Dorset that Mary had unearthed.
When the geologist discovered Mary Anning was struggling financially, he ordered a number of lithographs to be created, the sale of which was to benefit the collector. Even though Mary had discovered many of the world’s greatest fossils at the time, the science was dominated by men who proved happy to mine her for information, and just as happy to publish this without crediting any of her discoveries.

For myself, sadly I would only have a few very short hours to visit the region and really had to get a boogie on as it’s a large area and we had places to be. ‘The Pearl of Dorset’ was formerly a major English port, but today is more known as a tourist destination, and not just for dinosaurs.

The Cobb is a large harbour wall to protect the town and harbour from violent storms and sea surges. This structure appeared in Jane Austin’s final novel, Persuasion, and is a real favourite of the author’s fans, often calling themselves Janeites.  

Parking: The town itself is small with narrow streets, and though there is a parking lot, it seems to fill up quickly on busy days, so expect to do a lot of walking. This is also true for the shoreline as the city is situated on top of a hill, meaning you need to head through the city, down the main road (which isn’t that steep), and down the hill and ramp to water level.

The best fossil bearing rocks are easily seen. Just head a few hundred meters up the beach where you can clearly see layers of rock along the cliff face that were formed during the Mesozoic, and you’re there.

I can also guarantee there will be people fossicking, so just follow the crowd. Much of the cliff is limestone, itself made from the shells of microscopic organisms, so it’s important to look at every rock, and this means you don’t really need to go near the cliff as you can see things like ammonites everywhere.

This is important to note because, as I said at the start, this area can be very dangerous.

I assume I was there at low tide as the ocean was a fair distance from the cliffs, and between each was a wide, flat layer of rocks that were easy to walk across. There were also plenty or rock pools, leading to me to believe at high tide this area would be underwater.

 

As I said, I only had a short time, but I was there long enough to find a few hand-sized ammonites, and I was more than happy with that.

I could see some enormous ammonites contained in some large rocks, and as I had nothing to break these open, and in truth was not sure what the rules where for collecting fossils (I did find myself thinking, if its ok to take these, then why are these beauties still here?), so I was happy enough just to grab a photo.

All too soon my time was up and it was back up the hill and into town. Everywhere you look there are references to fossils, even the street lights are curled and contain an ammonite spiral inside….classyyyyyy.

There are two museums in town, but sadly both were closed (it was getting late in the day by the time I got back from the beach).

 The Lyme Regis Museum is built on Mary Anning’s home and store from where she sold so many fossils. The building looks amazing and I’m sorry I missed it.

 

  http://www.lymeregismuseum.co.uk/in-the-museum/fossils-and-rocks-of-lyme-regis

Dinosaurland Fossil Museum is a privately run institution, and contains not only great examples of local fossils, but some dinosaurs as well.

The town is also home to The Fossil Workshop, a commercial operation that not only prepares and sells fossils, but runs fossil walks- so they may be well worth a chat before you go as they may be running an excursion.

http://www.fossilworkshop.com/index.html

 

Dinosaur Isle- The Isle of Wight

Getting to the Isle of Wight is half the fun.

The island separated from the mainland about 7,000 years ago as the ice sheets covering Europe during the height of the Ice Age melted. This created a small strait, the Solent, which you can either cross on a ferry (with your car for a fee) or catch a hovercraft…A FRICKIN HOVERCRAFT! I have no idea what it is with the British and hovercrafts…and I don’t care. Bless their little empirical hearts for keeping a technology just because they really like it, not because it’s the most convenient. 

Lord Nelson's
HMS Victory



We we’re in the middle of a three week circumnavigation of the UK, thus had a car and had to catch the ferry to the island, but grabbed the hovercraft for a day trip into Portsmouth to visit the historical harbour containing the HMS Victory, Mary Rose and the HMS Warrior. To walk onboard those old warships was a real delight, and even if you’re not a military history buff I assure you, you’re going to get something out of a visit to the harbour.

To see the very spot Nelson died on the Victory is great, but what I really found remarkable is if you visit the gift shop you can actually buy slivers of timber from the old warhorse for a very reasonable price. I assume the upkeep of the ship is constant and those replaced timbers would otherwise be disposed of.

The Mary Rose is still under repairs, having spent centuries at the bottom of the sea. The ship is held within a side building where its timbers are treated constantly. Her skeletal remains sit inside a single room with atmospheric lighting, which switches and fades, allowing the penetrating shafts of light to pierce the gloom and continual spray about the ship, making the view beyond eerie.

The hovercraft port is walking distance from these ships, but be aware this entire area could easily suck up a whole day.

As the ‘isle’s’ dinosaur museum is outside the main city of Newport, the car turned out to be the perfect way to get there as we got to go for a lovely country drive (and got lost three or four lovely times), but there are buses that can get you to the museum if you’re on foot.

‘Dinosaur Isle’ is the first purpose built dinosaur museum in Europe and the buildings entrance has been designed to look like a Pterosaur, which it does. First opening its doors in 2001, when we visited the entry fee was around £5, and as we visited during the quiet season (read not school holidays) we pretty much had the run of the place.

The museum is just the latest installment in a long palaeontology history on the island. For centuries fossil shells and bones were discovered by gentlemen naturalists, and even today it’s a good idea to walk the island’s beaches after a storm as you never know what may have eroded out of the tall cliffs or washed up from the sea bed. Indeed some of the museums most famous fossils have been found by vacationers exploring the island.

The dinosaur fossils are found in a sequence of rock layers called ‘The Wealden Group’, which is composed of the sands and clays that once made up a giant flood plain and river delta that covered southern England during the Cretaceous. Later the region resembled the Florida Everglades, with swamps full of all the animals you’d expect to find there; turtles, mammals and crocodiles.

Entering under the head of the pterosaur, the first half of the building is mostly small marine and locally unearthed fossils. The first bend in this hallway reveals a nice life-size ichthyosaur diorama hunting down a squadron of letter ‘G’ shaped ammonites called Ancyloceras gigas if my memory serves me correctly. This serpentine corridor also passes numerous mammal fossils (including a rather nice hominid skull/head display) as the sea just off the Island was once part of a wide savannah called Doggerland. This explains why fishing nets continue to drag fossils from bison and mammoths out of the Atlantic between England and northern Europe.

This tunnel-like display eventually deposits you in the museums main hall. The island has proven to be something of a Cretaceous gold mine over the years as it was once part of a Mesozoic river valley system, explaining why such a small region has produced so many fossils. Amongst the dinosaur species (of varying completeness) found locally were a number of iguanodons, a Hypsilophodon, an ankylosaur (called Polacanthus), a brachiosaur (Angloposeidon), and four theropods, Baryonyx, Neovenator, a possible dromeosaur called Yaverlandia and one of the earliest tyrannosaurids known, Eotyrannus. This last discovery alone makes the Isle of Wight important as Eotyrannus places the tyrannosaurs in Europe, greatly expanding their previous territory of Asia and North America.

There are life-like models of most of these dinosaurs and a flock of pterosaurs hanging above your head from the roof. Behind many exhibits are also large images from famed paleo-artist, John Sibbick. One whole side of the hall contains a workshop where you can watch new fossils being prepared and preserved. At this time the museum contains some 30,000 specimens, most of which have been unearthed locally.

I got chatting to one of the preparators from this room (who turned out to be Steve Hutt, curator of the museum), and he explained the unexpected fact the National Dinosaur Museum’s (where I’ve worked on and off for over a decade) megalosaurid, Eustreptospondylus, was originally from the old Isle of Wight collection.

Outside the workshop are a number of hands-on-activities to keep the kids amused (ok, yes I was amused too) and best of all, friendly, accessible staff who proved more than happy to chat to a paleo-geek as myself.

After a few hours we left the museum and found ourselves pleasantly surrounded by a number of far more recent dinosaurs. While we’d been inside the large car park had been invaded by an Austen automobile club. That’s the quirky thing about the UK, wherever you go, people are proud of their history and privately do a lot to help protect their past.  Here was a car club, enjoying a shared holiday on the Isle of Wight, displaying their restored vehicles in the car park where they’d simply stopped to get a bite to eat.

It just goes to show you never know what you’re going to see when you visit this mysterious dinosaur island in the English Channel. 

DIRECTIONS.

http://www.dinosaurisle.com/how_to_get_here.aspx