Fossil Finder Database 2022
Although dinosaur footprints are relatively common in the Purbeck Beds of Dorset, dinosaur bones such as this iguanadon limb are very rare. The reason is suprisingly simple and obvious. Iguanadons only had two legs, but each animal made millions of footprints in its lifetime, so there were far more footprints than bones.
Dinosaur or not? Here are some beautifully-preserved vertebrae from a famous local dinosaur, Scelidosaurus. It lived on land, but its bones were washed into the sea and buried. Well, that’s the view of the museum – but some people think it’s a string of plesiosaur vertebrae. Expert comment welcome.
This ichthyosaur is located right in the entrance to the museum, and allocated the acquisition number ‘DCM.G.00001’ – meaning it’s the first specimen in the geological collection!
Here is a reasonably large ichthyosaur skull, complete with eye socket and sclerotic ring. The ring is a structure that supported the soft eye particularly as the animal dived to deep depths in search of food.
Mixed bag of bones This is an interesting assemblage of bones from part of an ichthyosaur. In fact, this is from the back end of the rib cage with the two back paddle bones, the femurs, and the vertebral column. We can tell that the rest of the body would have continued off the bottom…
Eye-lizard This bone is a humerus, the main bone that supported the upper front paddle. Its shape is typical for ichthyosaurs that lived at a particular time in the Upper Jurassic period. This fossil is a holotype and as such defines the species Ophthalmosaurus pleydelli, named after J C Mansel-Pleydell who collected and donated a…
This is a row of ichthyosaur vertebrae, with the tail to the right and the body to the left. There are about 180 vertebrae in the backbone of an ichthyosaur and they change shape along the length of the backbone. This specimen best shows that the facets onto which each rib attaches are located towards…
Long snout As the species name suggests – Leptopterygius tenuirostris – this is an ichthyosaur with a very long snout, which was armed with rows of small, sharp teeth. Less than a third of the snout is preserved in this specimen. It’s tempting to compare it with a swordfish but the similarities are only superficial. This is…
These bivalves – shells – live in groups with their pointed ends buried in the seabed. When sediment fills the gap between the halves of a bivalve, it may harden, preserving the fossil shell.