Dorset Always Had Dinosaurs, But it Didn't Used to Make a Fuss About Them

The Jurassic Coast is a New Thing (ish)

When I was a kid, Dorset didn’t have “the Jurassic Coast.” Of course, it had all the same things: fossilised footprints, fossilised trees, a natural arch, and a beach at Lyme Regis where you could collect fossils. It was all there. We just didn’t make a big deal of it. It wasn’t part of the marketing. Far from it. Back then, they called Dorset “the Forgotten County” because no one thought to put a motorway through it.

There was a dinosaur museum in Dorchester, and people who knew about these things (or bored families on the rainy days we used to have in the summer) went along and had a look. But now it’s gone bananas. Everything is about the Jurassic Coast, and I can’t get to Durdle Door in the middle of the day, even mid-week and outside of school holidays, without being overwhelmed by tourists.

Leave a comment

How Dorset Became a Brand

Instagram, Bollywood and Hollywood have played their part, but it’s mostly down to the deliberate marketing of Dorset as home to the Jurassic Coast, ever since the coastline was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site back in 2001. You see it everywhere now. There’s the Jurassic Coaster bus, which runs double-deckers along the coast road between Weymouth and Lyme Regis. There’s a Jurassic beer (actually one of my favourites), Jurassic Coast Fine Foods and even Jurassic Embroidery (I’m imagining how Stegosaurus would stitch up a onesie). Everyone now knows Dorset has the Jurassic Coast, and everyone wants to come and see it.

Or make money out of it.

The Lulworth Estate now charge £9 for anything up to three hours of parking at Lulworth Cove, or Durdle Door. Stay all day and it will cost you £25. Regular schools (England’s private schools are often called “public schools”) can’t afford to bring their students here on geography trips anymore because coach parking is £30 to £55 for the day. But the car park is heaving on sunny days and the estate is cashing in big time (they put bollards in on the top road where we used to park to go to Durdle Door for free).

Mary Anning, A Legend at Last

One of the good things to come out of all this attention is that Mary Anning is finally getting the recognition she deserved a couple of centuries ago. She didn’t just dig up fossils; she identified them, correctly, often before the trained men of the Geological Society who bought her finds off her and put their own names to the discoveries. Working from her father’s shop in Lyme Regis, she found some of the first complete ichthyosaur, plesiosaur and pterosaur skeletons ever recorded, and effectively taught herself the anatomy needed to understand them. Because she was working-class and a woman, she was barred from the Geological Society and rarely credited in her own lifetime. It’s taken close to two hundred years, but between statues, blue plaques and a permanent place in the story of the Jurassic Coast, she’s finally being remembered as the pioneering palaeontologist she was.

A Pliosaur Called Kevan

I went to the Dorset Museum recently, and it has also changed massively. I remember going on a school visit and looking at a few old fossils in dusty display cabinets, not to mention Thomas Hardy’s study, preserved as it would have been. It was dreadfully dull, and I didn’t go back for forty years, not until an exhibition there got written up in a national newspaper. I did baulk a bit at £15 to get into a little county museum, but it turns out that buys you unlimited entry for the whole year. Okay, I’m in.

Last week I went back to see a room that holds a remarkable find unearthed near Weymouth: a pliosaur skull discovered by a local fossil hunter, Kevan Sheehan, and painstakingly pieced together over eighteen months. At over two metres long, it’s one of the largest and best-preserved pliosaur skulls ever found, dating back some 150 million years, and the species was named Pliosaurus kevani in his honour.

The room also has a replica of the ichthyosaur that Mary Anning and her brother Joseph discovered. The original is in the Natural History Museum in London.

I think the original ichthyosaur fossil should be in the Dorset Museum. We are the Jurassic Coast that Londoners come to see, after all.

Thank you for being one of the good humans.

Alex

P.S. Molly is still enduring her chemical-free flea treatments (no fleas seen for over a week and she has finally stopped scratching), and still on very short walks, because of a flare up of her hip dysplasia. She limps if she does too much, which is her nature (and mine). But it's been wonderful in this hot weather to get down to Lulworth Cove early in the morning for a swim.

We head out together past the moored fishing boat and on to another boat in the middle of the bay, then back to shore. Not a huge swim, but a good ten minutes or so, and it’s good to be driving home as the tourists begin to arrive.

If you’d like to support my work without an ongoing subscription you can click the image below to

You can read more about my previous little lives in New Zealand and the Basque Country by checking out my book page at alexhallatt.com.

More Reviews Help Cartoonists Make a Living by Selling More Books

If you are one of the many readers who have enjoyed my books (usually available for free in libraries, like my latest, A New Zealand Diary), please leave a review, ideally on Amazon (where many people research books, even if they don’t buy them there) or Goodreads.
It costs only your time and helps me do battle with the algorithms.

Thank you.