Walking into dinosaurs

Life for the multitude of creatures isn't bad at all, as long as they can avoid being eaten by lifeforms further up the foodchain, itself quite a challenge given the plethora of predators large and small.

Ichthyosaur is a 15ft long sea dragon. It resembles a dolphin but is actually a reptile. It swims like a fish but needs to breathe air to survive.

Miles off-shore it is feeding on squid-like creatures, called belemnites, and fish in the top few fathoms of the sea when a storm blows up.

The primordial seas boil as the squall hits with tropical ferocity.

Ichthyosaur would normally take shelter in shallower waters but is too far from land to seek sanctuary.

Battered senseless by crashing waves and exhausted from its exertions, the powerful reptile succumbs to the elements and drowns, sinking into the darkness of the Cleveland basin below.

It's an eerie world devoid of light, oxygen and predators. The currents are slight too and ichthyosaur sinks into a thick, preserving mud, soon to be entombed in silt.

There it lies for millennia. When the ocean floor is uprooted and thrust upwards by clashing tectonic plates, it survives intact. When the glaciers scythe the tops off huge mountain ranges, it remains unbroken. And when the seas and storms erode the ancient shales off the North Yorkshire coast and the quarry companies have had their day, ichthyosaur lies preserved just inches from the surface.

One hundred and fifty years later, inclement weather has stripped away the bedrock in a deserted alum quarry near Whitby, exposing the snout of the hapless reptile.

To most it would be a lump in the rock to be tripped over rather than discovered.

To amateur palaeontologist Brian Foster it's a dream come true, an internationally significant find, a 15ft specimen which will help rewrite the geology books.

Brian explains: "I like to have a walk on the beach or the cliffs, but this particular day the tide was in so I went to an old coastal quarry. I found one or two bits and pieces and was just coming back when I got to a little stream. I saw a tooth, then another, then there was the snout sticking out of the ground.

"One of my major aims in life was to find something like this. The snout was sticking out of a hump under the ground so it was possible that the whole thing was there. It was so exciting but I didn't dare get too excited in case there was just six inches."

After calling in Sandsend collector and preparator Mick Marshall, the skull was excavated and the vertebrae continued back into the mound. "It just kept going on and on," says Brian, of East Yorkshire, who has been interested in fossils since he was a child and has been collecting them for the past ten years.

"On my very first fossil trip ever I found an ichthyosaur vertebrae so I knew exactly what it was. It was just the sort of thing I had been looking for, it was the find of a lifetime.

"It was going to be a huge task. We knew from the size of the skull it was going to weigh over half a tonne. But everything was just right. If it had been on the foreshore we would have had tides to worry about but it wasn't, it was in a disused quarry so we could do a proper excavation.

"It was brilliant and a great pleasure to work with the professionals. It's a very interesting contrast. I work in high technology during the week but at the weekends metamorphose into someone who likes going back 185 million years."

Keeper of geology at the Yorkshire Museum, York, Phil Manning was contacted and arrived on site with a team of 15 experts who would take five days to complete their task.

The further back they excavated the deeper the fossil lay and seven tonnes of rock had to be shifted by hand. Once freed, the specimen still weighed a tonne and it had to be winched up a 450ft cliff face by the team which included experts in abseiling. The whole thing was captured on film by the BBC, which funded the dig and will screen a documentary about it in October hosted by Muriel Gray.

"It's an internationally significant find," says Mr Manning, 33, who has been interested in palaeontology since he was seven.

"Normally specimens have been broken up by the sea currents. This has allowed us to fit the missing pieces of the jigsaw. It will rewrite many textbooks about which ichthyosaurs inhabited the east coast. For the first time we can absolutely say which types of animal we had on the east coast."

Palaeontology is one of the few sciences where amateurs can make a real difference. The experts are locked into work which allows them little time to go out prospecting for fossils.

"There is no way we can do our jobs without amateurs like Brian," Mr Manning says. "We just don't have the time."

The discovery has sent shockwaves through geological circles and there are plans to revisit the quarry. World renowned experts Professor Chris McGowan and Ryosuki Montani are to travel to York soon from the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada to discuss the find.

The museum is now embarking on a £10,000 fundraising exercise to pay for the fossil to be prepared - turned from a rock to an exhibit.

Experts will have to use compressed airtools to chip away the shale from the skeleton and the creature's stomach contents which were found close by.

Only then will they be able to discover exactly how the animal died. Painstakingly difficult work, it is expected to take six months to complete.

"There's a lot of hard work still to go and we need to find the money to pay for it," says Mr Manning.

Mr Foster, a managing director of an information technology company in East Yorkshire, adds: "It looks like a big rock at the moment. It will look fantastic when it is prepared, well it will to me."

Only then will it take pride of place in the Yorkshire Museum.

l Anyone wanting to know more about the topic can visit the museum until January 3 and enjoy the Walking with Dinosaurs exhibition. They can also look at the website www.bbb.co.uk/dinosaur and keep an eye out for the ichthyosaur dig page.