Duria Antiquior

I was walking in the shadow of giants, the cliff towering above the waves that crashed onto the sand, pushing up pebbles and detritus onto the Dorset shore. Loud, the sounds of children screaming in excitement running to grab as many rocks as they could with the hopes of uncovering a treasure beneath. The splashing of water and cries of seabirds added to the late-morning chorus as I walked westwards, away from the car park, pick in hand. My eyes shifted from the path ahead, the rocks beneath my feet to the blue expanse before me. Occasionally I would pick up a rock and twist it about in my hand, feeling its weight shift, looking for any sign that within its plain shell was a hidden treasure. A fossil, the last remnant of a creature long since perished, a time long since passed.

The salty air would hit, transporting me to another time. So much here has been found. So much is waiting to be uncovered. Putting the rock down and looking around. It’s strange. The path I walk today would have been walked by an incredible woman, over two hundred years ago. On this very path she would be looking for the same things I am looking for today. Would the air be as crisp as this? How many birds would be flying and screeching overhead? Would crowds of others be searching the beach alongside her, like the droves of fossil hunters with me today? Would she stop to inspect every rock for signs of a creature within? Would she stop to admire the unfolding sea before her?

On that same beach, in the year of The Lord eighteen-twenty-one, the woman with her pic in hand and her trusted companion, Tray at her heel, strided the sands and clambered over rocks. Her name was Mary, Mary Anning. A local celebrity for the town of Lyme and she was known to the leading men who studied geology in London. She could not receive funding from the Royal Society or any similar organisation for they had rules barring women from gaining membership, so she was resigned to selling some of her finds to support herself and her family. Such was how The Annings made their living for years. Fossil hunting was a fortunable profession for the inhabitants of Lyme. Rich folk from far and away wanted fossils to add to their collections.

The spiral shells of ammonites were Anning’s signature finds, as well as the pointed tips of belemnite shells. However she he was after something far more exciting today. The clouds draped the sky, obscuring the blue save for small patches poking through the blanket. A storm had worked its way to the Dorset coasts not a day ago, so the waves were still violent and threatened to sprint up the beach, and the wind was cool. But Anning marched along, keeping her eyes peeled.

Anning’s eyes scanned the cliffs upwards and downwards. What secrets and wonders they held. Her attention shifted to Tray’s barking. He had scampered up the rocks and was staring intently at the rocks. Anning ran, as much as her signature green dress allowed her. She climbed the still moist face and pulled herself up to the ledge. From the grey of the cliff poked out a darker patch of rock. Perhaps she had found it. Chipping away took Anning minutes, hours and days. Returning to the same spot day after day. The sky was now clear and the cliff-face less hazardous as the storm was now a memory to the landscape of Lyme.

The rock face grinned, a large toothy grin. Anning ran her hands over the giant’s teeth and circular eye. Her work was nearly complete. Mudstone had been peeled away to reveal a great prize. The skeleton of a beast that dwelled in Dorset in those most ancient of days. A beast the likes of which had not been seen for a great number of years. The skeleton was one Anning was all too familiar with: An ichthyosaur! Anning smiled in respectful appreciation and the skull smiled back. She looked at it and it looked back at her. The sounds of the beach: shouts of would-be fossil hunters, the barking of Tray, the squawking of seabirds and the crashes of waves all disappeared for Anning. The longer she stared at the skull the more she pondered ‘What was the world like, when this beast swam the seas?’

The same place, a different time. Dorset, one-hundred-and-ninety-five million years BCE, a time so far back that the geologists of Mary Anning’s day had little understanding of it. The world couldn’t be as old as two-hundred million years? But it was, and it had been around for far longer than that. At this time Dorset is not a coast but a warm sea. A seaway that connects a handful of islands that would one day become Europe. A sea that is in the process of splitting the world in two, separating Europe from North America. This is a new sea, for a new world. And this sea is one that a diverse cast of bizarre and wonderful creatures call home, such as Anning’s Ichthyosaur.

Just below the surface, the sun’s rays penetrate and the ebb and flow of the tides, as a prehistoric leviathan glides through the water. This is the beast that would find itself entombed in a rockface over a hundred million years in the future, but for now it is a living, breathing animal. This is Temnodontosaurus platyodon, with a long snout filled with piercing needle teeth, large foreflippers that control its pitch and yaw as well as a large vertical fluke all combined into a hydrodynamic form, one would be forgiven thinking it was a fish. But this animal is of reptilian stock, with airbreathing, egg laying and land living ancestors. At ten metres long, from snout to tail, it is a Jurassic Titan and the apex predator of its realm. In hundreds of millions of years its bones would be found my a certain fossil hunter along the Dorset coast.

This male is on a mission, travelling between islands and following currents, through sun and storm. This antediluvian sea serpent has been tracking the movements of shoals of fish through this ancient seaway… hunting for a feast. Nearing its destination and preparing for the hunt the predator begins to descend, the dark top half of its body blend it into the murk of the water, making it practically invisible to any animal swimming above it, a phenomenon in nature that will become known as countershading and found in all sorts of modern marine hunters such as sharks, which swim in the Jurassic seas, and dolphins, which have yet to evolve.

Just above the giant swims a shoal of Promicroceras planicosta ammonites. In Anning’s day and the present Promicoceras fossils are a common sight on the coasts, and in the fossils shops bound for collectors’ shelves. Their iconic spiral shells are what will be preserved in millions of years and become a staple of the Jurassic Coast. Ammonites such as these have shoaled the planet’s waters for two hundred million years previous, and will continue to do so for another one-hundred-and-thirty million years. Their fossils are a common sight for hunters across the ages of humanity around the world. For now these spiral shelled cephalopods roam the oceans following the currents, eating whatever swims into their tentacles. Beyond their shells they are very squid-like in appearance, with tentacles orbiting around a beaked mouth. However, like their modern relatives, squids and octopuses, this soft part is just flesh and muscle, no hard parts. So in millions of years only the shells of these curiosities will remain.

It is not the ammonites that Temnodontosaurus is after, they are far too small for him to even consider a meal. As a pup he’d eat Promicroceras and their relatives that swam these waters. But a creature of his size needs a meal that is much more substantial. And soon enough he finds such a meal; in the form of Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus, a pod of them swimming close to the surface. Like our Temnodontosaurus they are reptiles, air breathers. Their form is different. They are fish eaters, evolving long necks and needle-like teeth to snatch up fish from the water. They swim by undulating their flippers up then down as they glide through the water.

The hunter spots its quarry, an injured Plesiosaur with a chunk of its right hind flipper bitten off from the failed hunt of another ocean titan. The injured reptile lags behind the others, it's slower too; the perfect target. The Ichthyosaur positions itself facing upwards and, once the target is in position, the predator flicks its fluke in a rapid movement that propels it forward. Nature’s torpedo. By the time the Plesiosaurus realises it is too late. It’s held in the maw of a serpent before being launched in the air and crashing into the sea disorientated.

As the Temnodontosaurus moves to claim its prize, it discovers that its prey still has some fight left inside it. Writhing in the water, its flippers poised to harm its attacker. Its jaw gnashing in every direction it can. Our hunter gets reckless and is bitten on the jaw, causing it to momentarily retreat; returning only to snap the neck of its overturned victim with its jaws. Blood oozes into the crystal water and the Plesiosaur becomes still. The Ichthyosaur swallows the rest of its body whole, retreating down into the murky abyss before more opportunists arrive, catching the smell of blood.

Before she knew it, the sun had begun to disappear behind the cliffs. Anning climbed down the rocks and began walking back to town, the tide inching ever closer. As she strolled back home, her basket nearly filled with as many rocks as she could carry, her bonnet one gust of wind away from being lost, Her mind kept wandering back to her grinning skeleton and all the secrets that were forever lost with the creature. One day could anybody say with certainty what this creature ate? What did it look like? How did it live? How did it die? It was only recently that the educated men and women in Europe had begun finding such bones on beaches, in cliffs and in mines. They were unlike any living animal and always turned up in the oddest of places but it would be the dedicated people, like Anning, who would uncover the mysteries of the antediluvian world. What creatures lurk in the murk of deep time, and what they were like in life.

I bend over to peek in a rockpool. An anemone’s tendrils dance in the water while a blenny lies in the bowl. A seagull caws as it casts a shadow on the sand beneath it. The tide has begun to rise as I stroll back. In the distance buildings become larger as I get closer to civilization. So many have walked this same path as me, and I can see each and every one walking before me and after me. The final view of this Jurassic Coast is through the laminated glass of the windshield. How far we have come.