We’re back! We arrived home a few hours ago, and I’ve just got around to making a start with sorting the photos out.
We have been in Dorset on the south coast of England for the last week on holiday. We stayed in Abbotsbury, a small village a few miles east of Lime Regis. I’m hoping at least a few people outside the UK might know the name “Lime Regis”, and perhaps maybe the odd person might know why the name is somewhat famous.
Dinosaurs were first discovered in Lime Regis.
Many of the cliffs on the south coast of the UK display the ends of many layers of rock that have been exposed due to the various continental plates crashing into each other and causing ripples and tears over hundreds of millions of years. It’s quite common to find the wave pattern you normally find in sand when the tide goes out halfway up cliff faces in England - it turns out that most of what we now know as western europe was once an ocean.
As an example of what lived there, here’s a pebble I picked up in Lime Bay…
The spiral markings in the rock are the remains of Ammonites - squid like sea creatures that lived 190 million years ago. The particularly fine one on the end was the reason I picked the rock up. The beaches of the south coast are littered with such rocks, although it takes a practiced eye to find them (this stone was particularly rare in being so “obvious”). It’s worth pointing out that the sands following the retreat of the tide were littered with huge boulders, many of them having ammonites several feet across within them (I’ll save those photos for another time).
As I said - Lime Bay (also known as “The Jurassic Coast”) is famous for the discovery of “Dinosaurs” (although they were not known as that name for quite a few years afterwards). The first major find was by Mary Anning in 1811 - while out walking on the beach following a storm - collecting the ammonites to sell, she stumbled across the fossilized remains of what you could only describe at the time as a sea monster - it now resides in the Natural History Museum in London along with several others she discovered during her lifetime. She had discovered the first Ichthyosaur.