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.
Vearncombe’s efforts were part of a lengthy, complex and dangerous operation to move the skull of this T rex of the seas, which will be shown in a David Attenborough BBC documentary on New Year’s Day. The marine reptile was discovered in Dorset and identified as a completely new species of pliosaur that lived 150m years ago.
Attenborough will tell the story of the perilous mission to extract the gigantic fossilised skull of “one of the greatest predators the world has ever seen” from the disintegrating cliff face in treacherous conditions.
The skull alone is almost 2 metres long, and the colossal creature was embedded at a dizzying height, about 15 metres down the cliff and 11 metres from the ground – making it “very difficult to reach and even harder to work on”, Attenborough says.
Attenborough and the Giant Sea Monster will show the team abseiling down on ropes, hanging from them while drilling and hammering into the rock, working at speed before fossilised remains tumbled into the sea, lost for ever. When it rained, liquified mudstone turned into a potentially lethal slippery clay, increasing the danger.
This creature was one of the most ferocious Jurassic predators that hunted in the Kimmeridgean sea in the age of the dinosaurs. Attenborough notes that the rocks were once mud on the sea floor in which the remains of prehistoric marine creatures were buried: “Over millions of years, the continents shifted, the seas receded, and today, as these cliffs erode, fossilised skeletons are revealed.”
The pliosaur’s skull has survived with dozens of razor-sharp teeth with which it once ripped apart the flesh of its victims, including ichthyosaurs.
The find of the tip of its snout was made by Philip Jacobs, a textile designer who has hunted for marine reptile fossils on the Jurassic coast for decades. He spotted it among the beach shingle and immediately realised its significance. He contacted Etches, telling him: “I’ve just found something quite extraordinary.”
It had tumbled out of the cliff. It was too heavy to lift, so Jacobs buried it before returning with Etches. Using a drone, they pinpointed the spot on the cliff face from where it had fallen and quickly assembled a team, including palaeontologists, professional climbers and BBC cameramen.
Etches said: “It was very exciting but, thinking logistically, not a good place to collect a fossil from. The cliffs are sheer, crumbling and unsafe, eroding quickly. It’s a very dangerous area – with large rockfalls and slippery ledges – so safety was paramount.”
The team believes that the entire pliosaur may still be inside the cliff, but they concentrated on the skull, which can reveal more about an animal than any other part of its skeleton.
It has survived in extraordinary condition, and is possibly the best preserved and most complete of any pliosaur found.
Through groundbreaking science and cutting-edge visual effects, the documentary brings to life a creature that had wing-like flippers, a short, strong neck and a huge head with enormous jaws. It was “about the size of a doubledecker bus”, Attenborough says.
The universities of Southampton and Bristol and Imperial College London, were among those involved with studying the skull. The latest technology, including the most powerful CT scanners, could even reveal the reptile’s blood vessels and sensory pits.
Attenborough says: “Sensory pits found on our pliosaur’s snout may have acted like miniature pressure pads detecting the turbulence produced by ichthyosaurs as they swam through deep water. In effect, our pliosaur was able to stalk its prey even in the darkest depths just by using its skin.”
Each of its four flippers would have been 2 metres long, driving it through the water at great speed and enabling it to accelerate up to 30mph, making it one of the fastest animals in the Jurassic seas.
The analysis even revealed that it could replace its teeth multiple times – teeth that were long and sharp towards the front of its jaws and more hook-like at the back, a “deadly combination” for grabbing large sharks and gripping slippery fish.
Etches, 74, a former plumber, began collecting fossils more than 40 years ago, finding about 2,800 fossils from the Kimmeridge Bay area which are housed in the local Etches Collection museum. The skull will be displayed there after the documentary airs.
He took on the painstaking task of removing mudstone from around it: “What you see is a tremendous amount of work to bring it to life, with the help of a huge team of people.” Judyth Sassoon, a palaeobiologist and honorary researcher at Bristol University, is leading its scientific description, working closely with Etches. She said: “It took a lot of cleaning and preparation to reveal all the features that are scientifically important. When this fossil came out of the cliff it was rather grey and nondescript, more like a piece of ordinary rock. But Steve, with his eagle eye, recognised it for the important specimen it was, and now we can see it in all its glory.”
Of the achievement in extracting this extraordinary find from the rock, Etches said: “It’s a dream come true. I don’t think anyone in their right mind would ever believe we could have done it.”
