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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Dalya Alberge

David Attenborough film tells of risky mission to excavate ‘T rex of the seas’ from Dorset cliff

David Attenborough, in a short-sleeved shirt, looks up as he stands in front of a gigantic restored pliosaur skull
‘About the size of a double-decker bus’: David Attenborough with the restored pliosaur skull in the workshop of the Etches Collection in Kimmeridge, Dorset. Photograph: BBC Studios

It’s not every day that Dorset farmer Rob Vearncombe has to come up with a way to get a gigantic fossilised creature down from a sheer cliff face. Yet this is what he found himself doing earlier this year when he designed a crate on which the skull of an enormous prehistoric reptile was lowered off part of England’s Jurassic coastline – a massive engineering challenge.

“He deserves a lot of credit,” said fossil expert Steve Etches.

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