The Jurassic Coast

Language Level: Advanced
Source: Speak Up


Standard: British Accent 

Dorse, Devon and Dinosaurs

At low tide, large numbers of people come onto the beaches around Lyme Bay in Dorset, in the South of England. Instead of licking ice creams or making sandcastles, most of them search along the freshly exposed shoreline, eyes cast firmly downwards. Some carry hammers and chisels, while others wear bulging rucksacks on their backs. Schoolchildren scrabble among the rocks, their cries of delight rising above the noise of the sea as they show their discoveries to teachers and friends. Everybody here is looking for fossils.

Paleontologist Steve Davis, curator of the “Dinosaurland” museum in Lyme Regis, explains:

Steve Davis

Standard: British Accent

There are many good places for fossils around the world, in this country, but  I few of them really match up to the quality, the abundance and the diversity of the fossils that you get here. And, I mean, it’s dead easy for… I mean, you’re an expert you can go out there and find fossils, but much better than that, come along tomorrow morning at nine O’ clock, and I’m taking millions of little kiddies, you know, who are that big, out fossils-hunting. And they’ll all find fossils with ease, and that’s why, you know, Lyme is so good for the fossils and why it’s so important for them.

Steve Davis specializes in microfossils and, before opening his museum, he travelled the world as a paleontologist for an oil company.

Hydrocarbons, I mean, underpins the entire world economy: oil is a a commodity worth more, in terms of all the other commodities put together. And to explore for hydrocarbons, you’ve got to use microfossils.

Paleontology underpins all of that; how you go exploring and producing the hydrocarbons. Well, the pioneering work that underpins all of that was done on the cliffs out there, at Lyme, and no-one knows that.

“SHE SELL SEASHELLS”

The fossils along the 150 kilometres of the “Jurassic Cost” in the south of England are only visible today because of the gradual collision of the land mass forming present day Italy with southern Europe, over 50 million years ago. The force of the impact formed the Alps and sent shockwaves far northwards, lifting the fossils beds that are now visible at Lyme Regis to the surface.

Today the remains of those cliffs, rich in fossil treasures, rise high above the groups of schoolchildren and collectors. They are very unstable and continuously eroded by wind, rain and tide. The dark mud of the Black Ven cliffs flows like a glacier towards the shore. Every day a flood of fossils wash down onto the beach.

One of Britain’s most famous fossil collectors, Mary Anning, lived in Lyme Regis at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Mary, who was later immortalized in the tongue-twister, “she sells seashells on the sea shore,” would sell her finds to collectors and scientists. She made some incredible discoveries, including several large dinosaur fossils.

In recent years, fossil hunters have begun to attack the cliffs with mechanical tools in the hope of finding rare specimens. In 2002, the Jurassic Coast was declared a World Heritage Site, protecting the cliffs from future indiscriminate and dangerous digging. But exciting finds continues to be made, says Katherine Bone, who is senior warden at Charmouth Heritage Center, located just three kilometers along the coast from Lyme Regis:

Katherine Bone:

Standard: British Accent

One of the, the biggest things recently has been…a scelidosaurus, which is  a type of dinosaur that was found, about eight specimens have been found in the last 150 years, just in Charmouth…And, it’s a guy called David Sole, who’s a professional hunter from Lyme Regis. And he just walks between Lyme and Charmouth, so just that cliff there, every day, and he pulled out over the last couple of years, a whole skeleton of a scelidosaurus dinosaur. And the reason it’s so important is that it shouldn’t be here. 195 million years ago Charmouth was a marine environment; it was under the sea the whole time. So finding a land-living dinosaur at charmouth, and a rare one at that, that whole specimen , kind of thing, is, is controversial, definitely.

LIVING HISTORY

The Jurassic Coast is unique because it represent an almost continuously history of the earth during the Mesozoic era, around 245 to 65 million years ago, which comprises the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. This was the time of the dinosaurs. The first mammal, birds, and flowering plants were only just beginning to appear. Humankind simply did not exist. To walk this coastline is to follow a timeline between two major extinctions. An Exmouth, in East Devon, the rocks date from 250 million years ago –around the time when 95 per cent of the earth’s species were destroyed.

At the other end of the Jurassic Coast, at Studland Bay near Swanage in Dorset, the 60-million-year-old coastline dates from five million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs. It is a sobering thought that while the bacteria and algae that began the world are still here, other species have come and gone in a relatively short space of geological time. So if fossils are messengers from the past, what can they tell us?

Steve Davies:

Oh, gosh, I mean it’s never-ending, it tells you about life, you know, do you understand how you’re here and why you’re here and what’s led up to you. And it’s all there in the fossil record.