What is it about dinosaurs? They never really go out of fashion, but with Jurassic World stomping across multiplex screens for the past few weeks and scientists at National Geographic staging a televised “T rex autopsy” (fake, obviously), there’s no escaping them this summer. Maybe now’s the time to discover your inner palaeontologist and try fossil hunting. There are plenty of sites across the UK from beaches to quarry beds where you can give it a go, but some more popular spots are prone to falling rocks and are dangerous at high tide, so a little bit of research is a good idea. Go to ukfossils.co.uk for advice on the safest sites to visit.
Charmouth on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast is ideal for first-timers, says palaeontologist Simon Penn, as it’s quite safe and set up for holidaymakers who want to amble along and do the odd bit of fossil spotting. “At that end of the coast, you’re likely to find ammonites and belemnites that are around 190 million years old,” he says. (If you’re heading to Camp Bestival at end of July, keep an eye out for Jurassic CSI, which Penn helped to set up – mocked-up crime scenes where the culprit is one of six possible dino-villains.)
So if you stumble across something exciting, can you keep it? “It’s not like archaeology where you have to hand in anything amazing, but we encourage people to tell local museums if they find anything special,” says Penn. You never know what you might find – last month, experts identified Britain’s oldest sauropod dinosaur from a fossil in Whitby. Who knows what you might uncover?
Jurassic CSI will be at Camp Bestival 30 July to 2 August. For details of organised fossil hunting walks and “rockpool rambles” in Charmouth, visit charmouth.org. A guide to UK fossil hunt sites can be found at ukfossils.co.uk.
