Fossil Hunting on the Jurassic Coast

7th, 8th and 9th November 2022

I studied Palaeobiology and Evolution at the University of Portsmouth with my good friend Phil, who now runs the Visitor’s Centre at Charmouth – the gateway to the Jurassic Coast and a fantastic place to find fossils. Mary Anning famously found the first described Ichthyosaur in the cliffs between Charmouth and Lyme Regis in the early 19^th Century, amongst many other amazing finds. I spent many summers in Lyme Regis with my family when I was young, and I have visited Charmouth plenty of times while Phil has been working at the Visitor’s Centre – it’s always good to have a local guide to help find the treasures on the beach (and have a celebratory pint with after!). Being an accomplished geologist himself and fairly mental about fossils, Robert was keen to get down to Dorset for some fossil hunting so we both went down for a few days of fun on the beach. We planned to go out of the tourist season so it wasn’t as busy, and to take advantage of the changing weather which scours the cliffs and the beach, depositing new rocks and churning up others, giving us the opportunity to find new fossils before they’re washed out to sea.

The beaches on the Jurassic Coast really are fantastic for fossil collecting and if you plan on going it's certainly worth checking out the Heritage Centre at Charmouth – it’s a charitable organisation that aims to promote safe and responsible fossil collecting. They do regular guided fossil walks, which are great for kids and adults. They also have some fantastic specimens in their centre that have been found by local collectors, including the ‘Sea Dragon’ Ichthyosaur made famous by Sir David Attenborough as well as a life size cast of the most complete dinosaur ever found in Britain. Visit their website here.  

Day One – Charmouth West Beach, Black Ven

Phil had helpfully suggested the best days to come, when low tide was in our favour, so we set off bright and early to head straight to Charmouth and catch the low tide for our first day out on the beach. After a nice little coffee and a gawp at some of the recent finds in the Heritage Centre, we donned our waterproofs and went out into the rain. I think you probably have to be a bit odd to want to go out on a beach in those conditions, but there you go, we loved it!  

Prepped for a good day fossil hunting

A man in his element

The beaches along the Jurassic Coast are highly productive in terms of fossils partially thanks to the land slips that occur here. The soft mudstone is easily washed away, causing the cliffs to collapse – in fact, Black Ven is the largest mudslide in Europe. This is good news for finding fossils but does mean that care needs to be taken on the beach. We’ve seen plenty of precarious boulders sitting up on the cliffs, ready to squish some unsuspecting people below, and large slips are common. Best to keep a healthy distance from the cliffs – the Charmouth fossil hunting code prohibits knocking bits out of the cliffs anyway, and there is always plenty to find on the beach.

A safe distance in front of the cliff face

In many ways, it’s a numbers game on this beach – the more rocks you smash, the more likely you are to find some treats inside them! Of course, smashing the right rocks is the key, and the guys at the Heritage Centre can help with that (though sometimes there are some good finds in the most unlikely rocks). You can see that there are loads of rocks distributed over the beach, so it can be a little overwhelming at first, but once you’ve got your eye in it gets easier. I collected a small bunch of likely looking rocks, gave them all a whack… and nothing. That’s how it goes sometimes! 

Plenty of rocks on the beach,
but which ones to smash up?

A good selection of likely looking rocks...

...reduced to rubble with no fossils in sight!

We did find a smattering of ammonites and belemnites. Some nice rocks with assemblages of fossils in them – not really suitable for breaking up, but I took a couple to show my girls at home (the larger ones will look nice in the garden!). Phil got Old Painless (his sledgehammer) out to break a couple of the larger rocks, not just to make carrying it all the way down the beach worthwhile, but because some of those larger limestone nodules really were difficult to break open with regular hammers. It’s good to have the right tools for the job, though I wouldn’t expect most visitors to Charmouth to need the sledgehammer!

A small partial ammonite, not the best find but it's a start

Phil swinging the sledgehammer.
Don't worry, he's a professional!

A nice little assemblage of shells
in this nodule

I’ve never found anything from any vertebrates on the Jurassic coast. Both Robert and I were really keen for some bone or teeth or something – anything from an Ichthyosaur or a Plesiosaur really! One of the most frustrating types of rock on the beach is known as beef rock. Calcite crystals within the layers of mud makes this rock which appears sort of fibrous, which is where it gets its name from (it looks quite beefy), but some of the pieces of it look remarkably bony once they’ve been washed and worn by the sea. The number of times I’ve picked up a piece of beef rock, excitedly thinking it was a vertebra… but, sometimes there are quite nice ammonites found in the beef. They look different to the other types of ammonite, but we found a few little ones which are quite nice. There was a large one embedded on top of a huge slab of rock that had recently fallen down, so I used the bolster and hammer to get it out as carefully as possible. It could maybe do with a little cleaning up, but I think it’s a nice one – finally, something good from the beef rock!   

A decent beef rock ammonite

One thing I think is worth bearing in mind if you do go fossil hunting at Charmouth is that it isn’t that easy. Sure, sometimes kids stumble on amazing finds, but many people find very little. Phil’s been working down there for years, walking the beach so many times and breaking open so many rocks that he really has his eye in for spotting likely rocks as well as have the expert touch for splitting them open to give the best chance of finding something good. Go out walking with someone from the Heritage Centre, they’ll really help. And at the end of a long day fossil hunting, a nice pint of Palmers 200 goes down a treat! 

Phil's rock splitting skills at work

A nice pint after a good day on the beach

Day Two – Charmouth West Beach, Black Ven

Our first day at Charmouth had been one of my most successful days fossil collecting on the Jurassic Coast. I didn’t get photos of everything on the day, but I got plenty of nice specimens in my bag to take home! The weather had been OK, but there had been much heavier rain and storms overnight – good news for people looking for the beach to get battered – so we decided to return to Charmouth for a while in the morning, to hopefully pick up the spoils of the storm. The beach certainly had been battered and, in some ways, seemed like a different place – it really highlighted how the same mile or so of beach could be picked over every day as it could be incredibly changeable. But, though we started off with some blue sky, the storm really wasn’t done with us yet… the storm clouds gathered, the wind picked up, and suddenly we were being pelted with hail that was driving almost horizontally down the beach. It was unreal! We just turned our backs and weathered it out for a while, hoping it would settle down. Obviously, we couldn’t shelter by the precarious cliffs or we could have added falling rocks to the bombardment! We eventually decided to make our way back to the Heritage Centre, giving up on that stretch of beach for the time being.  

Some blue sky after the storm last night

The beach had been pretty roughed up

Storm clouds were gathering

It wasn’t all doom and gloom though. The hail eased off as we trudged back, so we kept our eyes peeled. Phil spotted a little bit of ammonite shell poking out of a rock and decided to give it a whack. This was literally the last throw of the dice on Charmouth beach for the morning. We were soaking wet, worn out from walking through the storm, our ears ringing from the whistling wind, but none of that mattered when he split this rock and Robert opened it to reveal this beauty! It's a large ammonite (an Asteroceras obtusum, to be precise), and you can see both the internal structure and the shell on the other side. It really was a lovely find and very exciting to be there when it was opened. Phil normally only sees a handful of these a year, so they really are quite special.

A great example of an Asteroceras obtusum

Day Two – Seatown

We hopped in the car after getting off the beach at Charmouth to head down the coast a little bit towards Seatown. Though it was past low tide, we should have had some time to get on the beach there for a quick look around. The weather wasn’t playing ball though, as the high winds were pushing the waves in far quicker than expected! Looking down the beach, there was no way we could safely get out to the fossil hunting ground and back again, so we parked that idea for tomorrow and went to the pub for lunch instead. And what a lunch it was! Local scallops followed by local mussels (with a couple more pints of 200 of course) – it’s hard to beat local seafood right by the sea, it was absolutely delicious.

So, overall, not as successful as yesterday, but that big find by Phil at the end of our walk at Charmouth made it worthwhile. We planned to return to Seatown tomorrow. 

Looks great, but it was incredibly windy -
and no way to get up to those cliffs with the
waves and tide coming in

Looking forward to our lunch!

Day Three – Seatown

It was our third and final day of fossil collecting for this little trip. After not being able to get on the Seatown beach yesterday, we came straight here in case the weather got in the way again. Actually, it turned out to be a pretty glorious day! The beach here is quite different to Charmouth. The cliffs are somewhat younger (still Early Jurassic but more like 185 million years old compared to 195 million years at Charmouth) and comprise more sandstone. Down by the sea, the beach is covered more in shingle rather than shale and larger rocks, which presents its own challenges for walking as your feet sink into it, but you have to walk past all that along the shore to where the larger rocks lie. It was an absolutely stunning walk on such a beautiful day. 

A beautiful day at Seatown

It's a bit of a walk to the fossil hunting grounds

The Anchor Inn is just visible - what a great pub!

Great views still as the larger rocks herald the
start of the fossil grounds

Lyme Regis is just visible in the far distance

Although the beach is quite different at Seatown, there are still plenty of reminders that, just as at Charmouth, this cliff is falling rapidly away and caution needs to be taken in case of rockfalls. 

The broken fence is a reminder that, not so
long ago, this wasn't the edge of the cliff

Fresh landslip at Seatown

Fresh landslip at Seatown

Fresh landslip at Seatown

Once you’re at the fossil grounds, the idea is much the same as at Charmouth – find the right type of rocks and break them open to see if there’s anything inside. A lot of the nodules here are bigger as they’ve not had so much wave action to grind them down. Still, that gave me a good excuse to have a go with Old Painless! 

I got the chance to have a go with Old Painless!

I got the chance to have a go with Old Painless!

I did find that there were more fossils on the outside of some of these large sandstone blocks that had fallen out of the cliffs. There was the beef rock ammonite that I got from Charmouth, but it seemed that there was a greater variety of fossils on these blocks at Seatown – if they could be safely pried from the rocks they were attached to. This required quite a lot of patience and perseverance, as well as a certain amount of brute force and ignorance! It actually became quite liberating when I realised that these fossils were going to get battered by the sea in a matter of hours, potentially damaged by tomorrow and certainly destroyed or washed out to sea very soon if nobody collected them. Thinking about it like that, it was better to have a go and potentially damage them in the process rather than just leave them to the elements. Before then, I was quite paranoid about trying to retrieve them with minimal damage. That’s not to say I became totally carefree, but I felt better about trying and less worried about perfection. As Phil also pointed out, they could be repaired later if they did get damaged during extraction.

I found two lovey bivalves that both looked like they could have been living out in the ocean today – they haven’t changed all that much over the millions of years! (I can think of some bivalve specialists who would probably balk at those sort of comments…) I managed to get them both off the rocks they were embedded in using a hammer and chisel. Both got slightly damaged in the process, but I kept all the bits wrapped up in newspaper to take home for repairing. They’re some really nice examples I think. 

Fossil scallop in situ

Fossil scallop, extracted and slightly broken

Fossil oyster, possibly Gryphaea, in situ

Fossil oyster extracted, minor damage

Climbing around on the rocks did get me thinking about the slight irony that we were so focused on these fossil shells, some of which almost look just like the ones we see today, and we were totally ignoring all the things that were alive around us! If any of these limpets or snails or whatever got buried and fossilised, would there be another set of palaeontologists clambering about this area millions of years from now, getting all excited about them and considering how interesting it was that the shells still looked much the same as they had done in the past?

I liked the different colour of this limpet shell

A bunch of living limpets

This snail was making its way around the rocks

We found a few other nice bits and pieces amongst the rocks. Some were impractical to do anything about other than take photos of them, like burrow systems on large slabs of rock. Just as at Charmouth, I found a bunch of likely looking rocks and smashed them open to find nothing, but I was quite satisfied with what I had found. In fact, I was more than satisfied with the entire trip – aside from being a fun three days with a couple of good mates, I had found a lot of good fossils. I have some nice rocks and crystals to take back for my girls to enjoy, and some interesting fossils for them to look at, so it was very successful. I was a little disappointed when I got home to hear from Phil that some kids had gone out on Charmouth beach today and found a load of Ichthyosaur bones… but there’s always next time!

The fossil hunting grounds at Seatown

Fossilised burrows on a large slab
of fallen rock

Aside from having a lovely time seeing my mate, Phil was immensely helpful; we wouldn’t have found half of what we did without his guidance. It’s certainly worth going to the Heritage Centre and booking on one of their fossil walks to get the most out of the experience. Everyone is friendly and keen to share their knowledge, and a little bit goes a long way towards helping you discover something interesting down at Charmouth and the neighbouring beaches. I’m looking forward to taking my girls down there next year in better weather and now I have a big pile of fossils on the kitchen floor at home to go through and sort out!  

Phil using his magic touch to split some more rocks

One more swing of Old Painless before it was time to leave

Packing up our finds and heading off