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.
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| 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.
