Toads on Tour: Lyme Regis Fossil Festival

I've just checked, and it seems that I've not published one of my own articles on here since October. In my defence, I was pretty busy researching visitor effects on African wild dogs at West Midlands Safari Park. The dissertation is now in, the whole summer is ahead of me, and I'm back with a recap of my recent trip to Dorset for the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival.

Lyme Regis Fossil Festival (or 'Lymefest' as regulars call it) was set up in 2005, meaning that 2025 marked its 20th anniversary, and it was set to be the festival's biggest year yet. Over the weekend of the 14-15th June, fossil enthusiasts, scientists, nature lovers, and families descended on the Jurassic Coast for a weekend of fossil themed activities, talks, performances, book signings, workshops, boat trips, and shopping. I'm writing this article the morning after the festival, while waiting on my post-camping washing (the editing has however, taken a lot longer, which acounts for its July publication!). Hopefully, with it all still fresh in my head, I should be able to give a comprehensive rundown of everything we got up to.

As I live in Birmingham, it was quite the journey to reach Lyme Regis, made all the more difficult by my extreme overpacking (I misjudged the weather and bought far too many warm layers). Still, the moment we'd finished setting up our tent in Uplyme, it was straight down into Lyme Regis town to pay our respects to Mary Anning. I've wanted to see her statue ever since it was erected, and I wasn't disappointed. Installed at the very southeastern corner of the town where the Gun Cliff Walk begins towards the sea cliffs, it's the result of a four-year campaign, Mary Anning Rocks, which was started by student Evie Swire at the age of 11, along with her mother Anya. 

As someone with an interest in palaeontology, I always have to remind myself that Mary Anning is not as well known as I often think she is. I have a similar thing with Rosalind Franklin - I tend to assume that female scientists are much better known than they are. Even so, it's certainly surprising that there was no visual memorial to Anning until this statue was unveiled back in 2022, marking her 222nd birthday. As the campaign explains, it is important to remember Anning visually, to give her a tangible and physical presence in Lyme Regis, and to create a focal point of remembrance and respect. The bronze statue was created by sculptor Denise Dutton, and is covered in all sorts of details, of which I particularly love all the ammonites, which can be seen on the ears of Anning's dog, Tray, and decorating her skirts. I also think the location for the sculpture is perfect, as you can easily imagine Anning striding down to the beach to go fossil hunting.

I hope to write a full article about Anning one day, so I won't delve too much into her remarkable story here, but for now, if you're not already familiar, I encourage you to go away and check out this article by the Natural History Museum. And if you do already know a bit about Anning, I encourage you instead to learn about her friend and fellow fossil collector, Elizabeth Philpot (I'm slightly obsessed with her sketch of an ichthyosaur skull, done using ink from a fossil belemnite).

Inspired by Anning, it was only fitting that we undertook some fossil hunting of our own. We didn't get long because the tide was coming in, and it was important to avoid getting cut off. As a side note, the Devilled Toads team always encourages safe fossil hunting practices, particularly keeping an eye on the incoming tide when prospecting in coastal areas. Despite the short time we had - maybe 40 minutes or so - and the many palaeontology enthusiasts descending on Lyme Regis for the festival, we managed to come away with a few nice finds. These included an ichthyosaur vertebra and some unidentified pieces of bone probably belonging to a marine reptile, found by fellow undergraduates Ryan Tokeley and Morgan Gall respectively. All I had to show for my efforts were a few bits of brachiopod, but as we were walking back towards town along the Gun Cliff paths, I spotted a rather nice ammonite that someone had seemingly left behind on a wall. I gratefully claimed this lovely fossil as my own, and am very thankful to whoever discarded it for giving me the chance to leave Lyme Regis with an ammonite of my own. I can see why Anning loved fossil hunting here so much, and I hope to return soon and find an ammonite of my own.

As it was starting to get late, we headed over to Lyme's Fish Bar for fish and chips. It is very conveniently located near to the seafront, and is also just down the road from Dinosaurland Fossil Museum. We decided to have our dinner down near the Town Mill, which made for a scenic spot to eat while avoiding the vicious food-stealing seagulls of the beach (a move we forgot to make later in the trip, causing some rather delicious pizza to end up as a casualty). We then returned to our base up at Hook Farm Caravan and Camping Park in Uplyme, a lovely site with good facilities and a pretty reasonable price on a student budget, so I can definitely recommend it. It is within walking distance of Lyme Regis, but do be warned that it's a steep uphill walk back at the end of the day. And so, after a few card games and spooky stories, it was time to rest up and get ready to take on the Fossil Festival.

We started the day with some delicious bacon sandwiches, before heading off nice and early to make it into town for the start of the festival at 10:00am. After a quick look in one of Lyme Regis' many fossil shops, we headed straight for the Lyme Regis Museum. Entry to the museum is normally £8.95 for adults (including free returns for the rest of the year), but was free for the duration of the festival. When we were there, the museum was absolutely crammed full of other festival-goers, making it a little tricky to take everything in, and I can only assume it was that busy the whole weekend, so I would love to return on a quieter day and explore it properly. That said, I was still able to see the whole place and feel like I was able to take a lot of it in, and the first floor Geological Gallery proved to be a particular highlight. As you might expect, there is plenty of ichthyosaur material, particularly from the giant orca-like Temnodontosaurus platyodon, but also a few fossils from the so-called 'Charmouth Dinosaur' Scelidosaurus harrisonii, the best preserved and most complete dinosaur yet found in Britain, known only from the Lyme Bay area. In fact, a drawing of Scelidosaurus by palaeoartist Dailydinosketch featured on the promotional material for this year's festival. William Buckland's coprolite table was another highlight.

Although there are some of Anning's writings and drawings on display, I was struck by how few of her fossils the museum seemed to have. This makes sense given Anning had to sell most of her finds to collectors and academics like Professor Richard Owen in order to make a living, and so many now reside in other institutions such as the Natural History Museum in London. I sometimes find it easy to forget that for Anning, collecting was her livelihood, as well as her passion.

As an aside, I want to note that the Lyme Regis Museum are also the organisers of the Fossil Festival, and they do an excellent job. They are clearly a passionate group of people, and I want to thank them for all the hard work that must go into organising this event every year.

Following our stint round the museum, we headed down the Marine Parade, with a quick stop to look at some of the trade stalls and chat with British Antarctic Survey and the Palaeontological Association in the Jubilee Pavilion. Both had fun activities for people to get involved in and plenty of interesting fossils, including those belonging to giant penguins, mosasaurs and Antarctic dinosaurs. At the end of the parade were the Lister Garden Marquees, the first of which contained rows of traders' stalls, with plenty of fossil-themed merchandise for sale. It was lovely to see people I've met before at TetZooCon, including the aforementioned Dailydinosketch and Speed Thief, as well as some new favourites, like Button and Squirt and The Cookieraptor. Unlike at TetZooCon however, I was mostly able to resist spending too much money, though between us we did have to purchase a few dinosaur prints from Emily Higgs, whose work I am utterly obsessed with (the Devilled Toad will have to forgive me for not buying a Beezelbuffo sticker, especially as fellow blog write Harry made sure to pick one up), as well as a packet of Jurassic Coast stickers from Harriet Rose which have already found a home on my laptop.

There were also plenty of fossil traders for those looking to add to, or indeed start off, their fossil collections. This included Morgan, who purchased a freshwater herring (Knightia) from the Green River Formation, dating to the Lower Eocene of Wyoming, and Ryan, who picked up a very nice Mosasaurus tooth. It can be so hard to find palaeontology-related merchanidse online, so it is always a treat to come to event like this one and be spoiled for choice. If I could have bought everything home again safely, I probably would have come away with about five times as much.

The second marquee had more of a focus on exhibitors, such as Natural England, The Woodland Trust, and Stori Brymbo (check out their Fossil Forest Excavation Experiences here). There were also a couple of university geoscience departments, which makes me think it would be nice to see a Birmingham presence in the future, at least in the form of an explicit University of Birmingham stall (though there were a few more of us students about the place). As it stands it was still nice to see other institutions being represented, and funny that both Portsmouth and Southampton decided to advertise using full-sized reconstructions of spinosaurid skulls.

Although the Fossil Festival is almost entirely free, there was a selection of paid headline talks. Due to a last-minute ticket release, Harry and I were able to attend 'Reconstructing the Lives of Dinosaurs' by Dr Darren Naish on the first day, which made for an enjoyable overview of the evidence, speculations, and extrapolations palaeontologists use to uncover the behaviour and natural history of dinosaurs. We also attended a free talk by Sally and Nev Hollingworth, who took us through the Cerney Wick 'Mammoth Graveyard', made famous by the 2021 BBC documentary, Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard. It was fascinating to hear them talk us through their story, which began with the discovery of a mammoth femur in a quarry near Swindon, the significance of which was transformed when Sally discovered a stone handaxe at the site in 2017. I know a few people who have volunteered excavating the site over the last few summers, so it was nice to get more context for what they've been working on, and to hear about the challenge of going from dig to exhibition at the Corinium Museum in Cirencester in just a few months. One thing I hadn't previously known is that the site has also preserved Jurassic marine fossils. Many of the people involved in the excavations were also present at the talk, and it was a lovely way to thank them and celebrate their efforts. 

You'll be relieved to hear that at this point, we did slow down a bit, spending some more relaxed time resting on the beach, eating ice cream, and checking out The Hub (more vendors and exhibitors, and also the location for the many palaeoart workshops). Most of the festival wound down around 17:00, but we still had one more event to tick off our list - the Terrible Lizards Live Podcast Event, our only 'must do' for the weekend. Capacity was capped at 40 people on a first come-first serve basis, so although it wasn't due to start until 18:30, we arrived closer to 17:30 to be sure we'd get in, and I'm certainly glad we did. If you've read my article on science podcast recommendations, you'll know that I'm a big Terrible Lizards fan. They did a similar live event in Oxford last year which I really wanted to go to, but sadly it fell during exam season, so I'm glad to have had the chance to make up for it now. Despite being massively into podcasts, I've never been to a live one, so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. It turned out to be an hour-long live Q&A session, with a good balance of questions, from some very technical palaeontological queries, to broader questions about the field, and even the podcast in general. The episode released on Wednesday 25th June and should be available wherever you get your podcasts, so I won't spoil it here, but what I will say is that one of us may have asked about pet hypotheses regarding the arms of tyrannosaurs.

On the whole it was a really fun event with a very nice vibe. It also provided a nice opportunity to catch up with other attendees, and start to relax a little after all the fun of the first day of the festival. And so ended our Saturday adventures - we had gone into the day without much of a plan as to what we wanted to see and do, so I was suprised about how much we had been able to cram in. We were certainly in good spirits about Sunday, especially since we planned to take things a little slower.

After more bacon sandwiches, and packing away the tent, we made it into Lyme Regis in time for a panel discussion titled 'How to Build a Dinosaur! Design, Development, and Delivery'. I had no idea what to expect, but it turned out to be the launch for the Everything Dinosaur Evolution project. Everything Dinosaur is a blog and UK supplier of dinosaur models, founded by Mike Walley and Sue Judd, launching a new range of dinosaur models, which they believe to be the most scientifically accurate in the world. This is starting with four dinosaurs from the End-Cretaceous of North America; T. rex is the first and is almost ready to be launched commercially, and will be followed by Triceratops horridus, Edmontosaurus annectens, and Anzu wyliei. One of the exciting things about these models is that they've been designed so that they can interact - the T. rex, for example, will be able to fight with Triceratops when posed together, or bite the tail of Edmontosaurus.

This turned out to be a really interesting panel. Sure, it was a sales pitch, but it was also incredibly interesting to hear about the process that goes into creating a scientifically accurate dinosaur model. It was fascinating to hear from palaeoartist Bob Nicholls and Manchester-based palaeontologist Dr Dean Lomax about the reconstruction side of the process, how you go about turning the fossil evidence into a living animal. One detail I appreciated was the inclusion of trichomoniasis, a parasitic infection found in modern birds, and hypothesised to be the cause of erosive lesions in the jaws of several T. rex specimens, potentially spread through intraspecific jaw biting. I found Glen Southern to be the highlight of the panel, as digital sculpting was something I knew nothing about. You could really feel his passion for the medium, and his conviction that anyone can learn to do something similar in sculpting software such as Blender has almost convinced me to go away and give it a try. It was interesting to hear about how the greatest challenge of this sort of work is anatomy, as sculptors are usually trained using human anatomy and that of other mammals, so switching to the bones and muscles of reptiles like dinosaurs makes for something akin to a culture shock.

We got very lucky with the weather this year, and so on Sunday we decided to make the most of it by going for a swim. I didn't want to get my hair wet when I was going to have to travel back by coach later on, so in a stroke of either genius or idiocy, I stuck it in a woolly beanie (a dinosaur one from Utah, of course) as a makeshift swimming cap. Still, I'm so glad I did, as it turned out to be the highlight of the trip, as, once in the water, just a few feet away from us popped up a curious grey seal (Halichoerus grypus), watching us with its massive eyes. Another swimmer who was returning from further out reported that she had felt it brush up against her legs, so it was clearly habituated to humans, which makes sense for such a touristy place as Lyme Regis, swimming up to the rocks and boats to see what everyone was up to. 

I will just take a moment to remind everyone to give wildlife space. A seal in the water is unlikely to hurt you, and they tend to be rather curious, as this one was, but you don't want to scare one, as you are at risk of a nasty blood infection called 'seal finger' if bitten. This was a magical experience, made even better because the seal was comfortable.

Eventually the cold got the better of me, and I headed over to catch the tail end of 'The Iguanadon Restaurant', a performance by Emerald Ant, taking you through the first 50 years of palaeontological history, based largely on the famed New Year's dinner of 1853 that took place inside one of the Crystal Palace Iguanadon moulds. I can't say I followed what was happening particularly well; Richard Owen unsurprisingly seemed to be the villain of the piece, and I think he might have had Gideon Mantell murdered so he could work on the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs. Charles Darwin also showed up with wings at the end, which I think might have been a comment on the bird-dinosaur connection. It was a lovely way to preserve the tradition of children's theatre at the seaside, and another year I would like to catch the full half hour performance. We also passed the Lyme Morris, with the T. rex Lymeosaurus, but missed their performances.

After lunch, more ice cream, and more shopping, we decided our last stop for the day should be the famed Ammonite Pavement. At the western end of Monmouth Beach to the west of the town, when the tide is out, you can walk across the titular limestone ledge filled with thousands of ammonite fossils dating to the earliest Jurassic. They mainly belong to the dinner-plate sized Coroniceras, of which you will tend to find two size classes - the larger shells are referred to as macroconch and smaller shells as microconch. These used to be thought to belong to two closely related yet different species, however, as they are so often found together, it is now thought to represent sexual dimorphism, with the females possessing of larger shells, similar to many extant cephalopods.

I must admit, as a biologist it feels strange to be walking along a beach listening to the sounds of people hammering away at rocks, and you can certainly see where rocks have been smashed open in the hopes of finding an ammonite. In many ways, Monmouth Beach in the summer is more like a quarry than a beach. Most of the larger specimens are left in situ for others to enjoy, partly because they are imbedded in larger, immovable rocks, and I can't say I had any luck finding a small ammonite of my own. I think this area is probably so well searched, you'd have to get pretty lucky, and I wasn't able to stay for long as we had to get back to the car, so perhaps a few hours might have yielded better results.

And so ended a fantastic first Fossil Festival. I'm so glad we organised this last minute trip, it really was the perfect way to spend a weekend. As I'm writing this article, it's making me want to head back to Lyme Regis immediately, and spend some more time exploring the local area, rockpooling on its beaches and hunting for more fossils. Likewise, with more time I would have loved to visit the nearby Axe Valley Wildlife Park (and indeed add it to The Zoo Review). I've very much focused my discussion here on what it's like to go as an adult with a passion for palaeontology, and I was delighted by how much there was to do, but the festival is also well suited for families, with plenty of activities to get stuck into, like guided fossil walks, fossil polishing, clay fossil making, and film screenings. 

If I had more time (and money) there are so many more things I would have loved to do. We didn't make it to any of the book signings in the end, and I'm especially disappointed to have missed Mark Witton talking about his new book 'King Tyrant', nor did we manage to attend any palaeoart workshops. We only got tickets to the one headline talk, although in some ways I think that was a good thing, as it meant we could be a little more relaxed, rather than rushing back and forth up the high street to Pine Hall. I also would have liked to have caught the Lyme Bay Moonrakers, who were singing shanties, folksongs, and ballads along the Marine Parade on the Saturday, and perhaps next time I'll treat myself to a boat trip. For those hoping to attend next year, my recommendation would be to, where possible, group together the talks you want to attend, to give you clear stretches of time to explore the rest of the festival without worrying about your next timeslot. 

Checking my social media pages, it's been great to see everyone's pictures of the festival, as jealous as I am of those who managed to see bottlenosed dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) in Lyme Bay. I can't believe I missed it. Oh well, I guess there's always next year - I absolutely will be back, and I hope to see some of you there!

Sources

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Eylot, M.C. (no date) Mary Anning: the unsung hero of fossil discovery. Available at: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/mary-anning-unsung-hero.html (18 June 2025).

Fossil Festival Lyme Regis (2025) Lyme Regis Fossil Festival. Available at: https://fossilfestival.com (Accessed: 17 June 2025).

Inside Dorset (2022) New Mary Anning statue for Lyme Regis. Available at: http://www.insidedorset.co.uk/new-mary-anning-statue-for-lyme-regis/ (Accessed: 17 June 2025).

Lawrence, I. and Hone, D. (2025) TLS11E06 LIVE AT FOSSIL FESTIVAL (Terrible Lizards) 25 June. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6AoqsjBg7cU9oRk3zlPY0N?si=fjq3sB25ScSCKEZerKO0-g (Accessed: 25 June 2025).

Mary Anning Rocks (2025) About the Project. Available at: https://www.maryanningrocks.co.uk/about-the-project (Accessed: 19 June 2025).

Oxford University Museum of Natural History (2016) Tales from the Jurassic Coast. Available at: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/mary-anning-unsung-hero.html (Accessed: 18 June 2025).

Wolff, E.D., Salisbury, S.W., Horner, J.R. and Varricchio, D.J. (2009) Common avian infection plagued the tyrant dinosaurs, PLoS One, 4(9), doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0007288.