Or is it the cliffs of Dorset? Anyway, it’s a very good-looking skull, apparently. Apologies in advance, there’s some annoying ads that obscure part of the article and I’m not sure how to get rid of them.
Now that’s a proper sea monster right there.
cue vworp-vworp Tardis noise
This is a stone’s throw (figuratively) from where I live. It’s big news here.
I often visit these beaches to hunt fossils - never found anything as impressive as that of course - usually ammonites and once a little piece of icthyosaur rib bone, but it makes me wonder… I am never the only person on the beach when I go there; if I were to find such a notable fossil as this, the right and proper thing to do is to leave it in situ and report it to a local museum so it can be properly collected, preserved and studied, and I’m OK with that, but in practice, how do you do that? How do you leave it in situ when the beach is teeming with other hopeful collectors, not all of whom will be inclined to do the right thing?
You could probably call someone and stay there until the pros arrived?
Maybe they should have a number you can call to report a find so you don’t have to leave?
Minus One?
I thought I read somewhere or saw something that said it was fine to explore for, but illegal to keep fossils from littoral areas around that part of England (is it AONB)? Maybe it was a different part?
No, that’s incorrect.
I mean, technically, it’s illegal to remove anything from a beach, because the 1949 Coast Protection Act states
it shall be unlawful to excavate or remove any materials (other than minerals more than fifty feet below the surface) on, under or forming part of any portion of the seashore
However, the intent of that law is primarily to prevent commercial removal and exploitation of gravel, stones, sand, clay etc in bulk quantities. A pedantic strict interpretation of the act would make it illegal to go home from a beach with dirty shoes.
In practice, it’s permitted for people to collect shells and fossils from beaches in reasonable quantities for personal use. This is supported by official signage at most of the beaches on the Jurassic Coast (indeed at the beaches I frequent, the signage, placed by the local authorities, often tells you what sort of fossils you might look out for to collect), and also various codes of conduct for responsible amateur fossil collection.
Edit: there are some stretches of the Jurassic Coast (Kimmeridge Bay for example) where the land down to the high tide line is privately owned - so at Kimmeridge, that includes the cliff face - the landowners may therefore rightly assert that fossils embedded in the cliff are part of the mineral rights of their property - indeed at Kimmeridge you can’t get to the beach via land, without crossing private land (so you have to pay at a toll booth just to get there).
That’s not possible in a lot of places, especially the hotspots for fossil hunting; when the tide comes in, there is no beach - the water comes right up to the foot of the cliffs - in some locations you’d need to walk a couple of miles to get back to a place that will remain dry at high tide (and thus you need to set off with ample time to make that hike), so even the idea of staying in the general vicinity isn’t always possible.
The picture in the BBC article suggests that would have been an issue here.
But even if you can stay, there’s still a scenario that involves on one hand, a person who wants to leave the fossil in situ for proper excavation and curation and some person or people who want to drag it out the beach/cliff face with their bare hands and flog it on eBay/stick on the kitchen wall. That’s potentially fraught and while a person might choose to face down other collectors in full Henry Jones Jr “This belongs in a museum” style, they would also be forgiven for deciding that they didn’t in fact want to do that. Not everyone is going to come out well from that situation.
Unless you’re blessed with physical presence, probably your best bet if people aren’t listening would be to cite that very useful law and offer to film people’s excavation attempts. And you’d probably be ok but crowds can be a little unpredictable.
But if you’re staying in order to guard it until the pros arrived, the people you’re guarding it from would be leaving too.
The most interesting thing, to me, it the photo labeled “Third Eye”
I know about the Parietal Eye in tuataras and a few lizards, but this is by far the largest animal I’ve ever read about that has one. It makes you wonder if it had more functionality than the ones in present-day creatures.
Yeah, right, a “beautifully preserved 150 million year old fossil”. That’s clearly a modern skull; one of Nessie’s relatives. Pliosaurs are obviously alive and well. I certainly wouldn’t want to take any small watercraft out in the vicinity of the cliffs of Dorset, or anywhere in the English channel.
The walk back to safety might be a mile or more across a boulder field that looks like this:
I would never leave at the last possible moment - not just because rushing across this terrain is a recipe for injury, but also because if you are absolutely racing the tide, you are going to be walking right underneath the cliff, which is where the boulders come from, usually without warning.
I’m not sure what that has to do with what I was saying. I have a feeling we’re on different pages here.
If you try to stay there longer than anyone else there is willing to, you are putting your life at risk.
The midpoint of any journey I make in front of cliffs where you can get cut off by the tide, is the point when the tide turns and begins coming back in, because I know that I definitely have time to get back to the starting point.
When I do this, I nearly always see people who are continuing on the outbound leg. They’re probably OK, but they are taking a risk that is bigger than my risk appetite.
There was bit of fossil-finding drama in Santa Cruz earlier this year. A woman came across this odd-looking object on the beach. She took a picture and posted it on social media. A curator from the Natural History Museum saw the image and identified it as a mastodon tooth.
When the curator went to find it, the tooth was gone. Turns out it had been picked up by a local jogger. As luck would have it, the jogger saw a story in the news and contacted the museum to turn it over.
Article from the museum website: Mastodons and the Museum
So very cool!
This isthe greatest graphic ever.
Mary Anning would be proud.