Lost Dorset dinosaur footprint site

Paul Cox (UK)

The year was 1991, we were on holiday in Dorset and we had gone to the beach for the day. The children were engrossed in a game of make believe, my wife was reading a book and I, as I often do, had started to walk down the beach observing the local geology. After ten minutes or so, I noticed someone walking in my direction, stopping every now and then to observe a rock or pick up a pebble. A fellow fossil collector? As he drew nearer, I hailed him. “Hello, have you found anything interesting?”

He was looking for a particularly exquisite ammonite, which could only be found locally. He then asked, “What did you think of the open day at the quarry yesterday?” I had to admit to him that, as a holidaymaker, I had not heard of the quarry. “You must visit it before you go home. It’s well worth it,” I was assured.

The next day found us travelling on a narrow road, parallel to the sea. Rolling green fields stretched into the distance. In the near treeless terrain, small farms stood at about two mile intervals. Many of these farms appeared to supplement their income with small limestone quarries. Eventually, we arrived at our destination – a large, whitewashed farmhouse, standing on its own on the seaward side of the road.

Leaving the family in the car, I went to speak to the farmer. At first, he was not very pleased to see me. He was passionate about what he had found, but was not getting any support for leaving his find in situ. In a few weeks, lack of income would force him to recommence quarrying and destroy something that was probably unique in the UK.

About two years earlier, the farmer had uncovered the first large dinosaur footprint. The limestone in which the footprint was embedded had the appearance of cracked mud and traces of smaller footprints were visible. Intrigued, he had continued to excavate along this horizon until, eventually, he had excavated the full extent of his quarry. Now, with the income lost from the quarry, the only way to preserve the find was to use the site as a tourist attraction. Unfortunately, the local council were not willing to grant the necessary planning permission. The open day had been held to help raise awareness of the farmer’s plight and, hopefully, to persuade the council to change its mind.

After initially being unwilling to allow us to look at the site, the farmer eventually relented and we were led down a track and into a small quarry, not visible from the road. On entering, the first things that struck me were the two sets of large dinosaur tracks. One started just to my right and ran some 60 feet or more diagonally across the floor of the quarry and into the base of the quarry face. The other set of tracks started some 20 feet to my left. They ran diagonally, crossing the first set of tracks in the middle of the quarry, and again ran into the base of the quarry face some 60 feet distant.

We walked, almost dazed by what we saw, and stood in the centre of the quarry. The ground on which we were standing had the appearance of fine estuarine mud that had dried and cracked in the sun. On its surface were tracks of every kind, some made by snails and some made by worms. However, the most intriguing were the many small dinosaur or possibly lizard tracks. Most of these had been made by creatures no bigger than a domestic hen and many of them were accompanied by the thin line in the mud made by the creature’s tail. As we stood there, it was as though we had truly gone back in time – the mud seemed as fresh as it was the day the dinosaurs had walked on it.

It was truly a once in a lifetime experience, to be standing where dinosaurs had once walked and to be looking at the mud flats just as the dinosaurs had seen them when they left their footprints, some 180Ma. No museum could come close to reproducing this.

From what I can remember after 20 years, neither of the two large dinosaur tracks had tail marks associated with them. The stride between each footprint on the large tracks was about eight feet and each footprint was perfectly formed, as though the dinosaurs had been walking slowly. Each individual footprint was about 90cm long. One set of the larger tracks looked very much like a very large bird footprint, with a long rearward pointing digit. The other set was distinctly different, about the same size, but stouter and lacked the rear ‘toe’. The tracks were so fine that the impressions of individual scales could be seen on some of them.

Other fossils were also present, including remnants of turtle shell and a few casts, which had been lifted out of some of the large footprints. I wanted to take photographs to record the uniqueness of the site, but I had not brought my camera. My daughter had a toy camera that used a tiny 110 mm film cassette. There was one shot left and I took a very grainy picture of both my daughters standing near the quarry entrance next to the cast of one of the larger footprints.

About six months later, my job brought me into contact with the local council, so I enquired about the fate of the quarry. No one I spoke to had ever heard of the site. Perhaps, someone reading this article will be able to throw more light on what eventually happened to this unique resource.

As a final irony, about 18 months later, the film Jurassic Park came out on general release. I am sure that if this film had been released some two years earlier, there would today be a world-famous dinosaur footprint site in Dorset.

Further reading

Dinosaurs of the British Isles, by Dean R Lomax and Nobumichi Tamura, Siri Scientific Press, Manchester (2014), 414 pages (softback), ISBN: 978-0-9574530-5-0