When Matthew Myerscough walks along a beach, he cannot help hunting for fossils. “I think my fossil radar is always on – even if I’m not looking, it’s hard sometimes to not see things,” says the 40-year-old civil engineer, who has discovered thousands of fossils on British beaches.
It was while he was “not looking” on Lavernock beach near Penarth, south Wales, that he recently stumbled across the fossilised bone of an early type of plesiosaur, a marine reptile that roamed the oceans while dinosaurs stalked the land during the early Jurassic period.
