I'm standing in the Etches Collection
in Kimmeridge in Dorset.
The new home to the skull of a giant sea monster.
Not a dinosaur, but a marine reptile
that scientists are agreeing could have beaten a T-Rex in a fight.
The giant sea monster in question is a pliosaur,
an enormous marine predator that used its intimidating size, strength
and teeth to snatch ichthyosaurs in the ocean around 150 million years ago.
This new specimen believed to have been around 12 meters in length in total,
is thought to be a new species, marking a discovery of huge academic potential
that all began with the discovery of a fossil snout on a beach in Dorset.
Now it's found a new home at the Etches Collection.
I'm here to speak to Steve Etches and Chris Moore,
arguably the stars of a new series from David Attenborough and the BBC,
about the discovery of a giant pliosaur skull halfway up a cliff.
It wasn't easy getting out,
and we want to hear how it went.
Chris and Steve, thank you for letting me into your workshop.
Could you just introduce what it is you have to do with this magnificent fossil?
Well, I’m Steve Etches.
Collector, preparator and general dogsbody, of the Etches Collection here at the museum.
My name is Christopher Moore,
and like I say, I work with my son Alexander Moore, Alex Moore.
And we're in West Dorset, in Charmouth next to Lyme Regis.
So the Jurassic Coast is extremely famous in the UK for its fossils.
Could you just tell some of our overseas viewers why that is?
Fossils along this coast have been collected for hundreds of years now.
And it was a shallow, marine, warm sea
very rich in life, and it's constantly eroded by the English Channel,
you know, it's in the southwest of the UK.
We get big storms that wash away the soft clay and continually reveal new fossils.
The other thing is from West Dorset,
to East Dorset, you’re walking through the whole suite of Jurassic rock.
So, you’re going through time.
So all the rocks are dipping this way and they're cut off
and you can see every Jurassic sequence of rocks.
You guys had the intimidating task of getting this thing out of the cliff face.
When you first saw the snout segment,
the video sent to you, what did you think?
Well the rest of its somewhere up in the cliff,
and that's what we have to find out.
So we put a drone up and scanned all the way along the cliff
and then found what looked to be the rest of it stuck out
but again, we need to confirm that.
So that meant a trip down the cliff on ropes to actually go down and see.
And when it was found, because Phillip Jacobs found the thing
when we got it back, we realized when we went back to see
“has it come out?”
So we visually looked and thought there was some talk about could have gone east,
sometimes you get what we call longshore drift, and I thought “no”.
So we looked up at the cliff and got this drone going and through that
and some stills we took of the likely looking bits,
we came to the conclusion, “yeah we we think we found it”.
The whole head had turned upside down
so it had been buried with its lower jaws upwards.
When you find a fossil in a ledge or whatever,
we always turn them upside down because when it dies, the bit that goes down
in the mud, is undisturbed, its always the topside
that starts to degrade more rapidly.
The whole cliff is composed of what we call mudstones.
And mudstones is really a very compressed,
lithified clay, it's really hard for us to excavate into that.
But leave it a couple of months and you get wet-dry effect
and it starts to revert back to clay, that slimy, sticky clay,
so erodes away very, very quickly.
You look on these programs, and they’re in a quarry, its dead easy in there.
They have cups of tea and they brush away.
This was nothing like that, I can tell you.
Do you think you could estimate,
ignoring sort of the breaks you had to take for sleep and weather,
how long the project took once you found it to finally getting it out?
The actual digging, I think, probably took two weeks.
Two weeks of continuous chiseling, to reveal and get to the back of the skull
and then to plaster it to keep it safe
so we could, you know, actually drag it down.
Initially, we did have that idea of bringing in a landing craft
and trying to get it out and then lowered it to the beach.
But then the cost and the the sheer logistics of doing that
became prohibitive and then it was like,
“okay, what else do you do?”
You know, you create a box and then with a big digger,
a big high mack, you actually pull it back up the cliff face
and take it away from the farmer's field on the top.
And I didn't think about the weight of this thing
its pretty much of a tonne.
So, the thing then, well its got to go up the cliff.
And a guy, who is a farmer, an engineer really,
developed this, made this cage and this thing to actually take it up the cliff in.
And so then you get back to your workshop
and what are you faced with doing at that point?
It was two months of lying there slowly,
the mudstone drying and cracking and everything else
and it was...and the BBC, when we took the top layer off,
“So what do you think?” and I was going
“Oh my God, how am I going to do this?”
What are the biggest signs to your eye that
this is a new species we're looking at?
One of the most the most convincing things for me
Is this crest. Every other pliosaur skull we've ever seen has not got that.
So that's one really, really unique feature to this.
But you see the jawline, which normally ends by the front of the eye,
this ends at the back of the eye.
So that's something really different.
And I mean, that brings us to the teeth.
It's pretty hard to ignore them.
Can you talk a little bit about how we've gone
from the sort of slightly worn down model and how we end up here?
Steve was on one side the skull and I was on the other, and on the side
I was on and there was a round piece showing, you know,
I thought “thats very strange”, separate from the skull.
We started to dig it out,
and it was a complete tooth that had fallen out
and was just literally in the shale at the side of the skull.
So we excavated that and Alex, my son,
put it back, it took fourteen hours gluing the pieces back.
And then that gave us a model for what the teeth looked like.
So we had it scanned to make the sizes for the roots, and then you could scale up
the complete tooth to make all the various ones.
Often, pliosaurs are portrayed with just the crown stuck out of the jaw.
These are extended. Well, we know full well now from this specimen
that their roots stuck out way beyond the jawline.
What do pliosaurs have that they would have used in life
specialized for their lifestyle, feeding things like that?
- Killing. - Very big teeth, for going, “CRUNCH”.
And the thing is, in the collection here, we’ve got lots and lots of bones
with huge, great, triangular bite marks in from these.
There's no other reptile thats got these triangular teeth.
When these things go to poo, its rather like chicken.
They don't wee and poo they do it together, and its just like a liquid, it shoots out
because everything's digested.
So we don't get copperites or fossil faeces with bones in from these animals.
Its been described as the largest carnivorous reptile thats ever lived.
Is there anything comparable living today?
There's nothing like pliosaurs or plesiosaurs that exist today.
They disappeared same time as the dinosaurs did, you know,
in that great mass extinction.
They think that they swam in a very similar manner to turtles
with a paddle for the flippers so their locomotion looks like that
and they can turn rapidly.
The only thing that comes through, you know,
that extinction event that we can relate to now are crocodiles.
Do we think there's anything left to find in the cliff?
There certainly is.
The rest of the body is there, I’m sure.
Its slightly disarticulated, so it's come apart, but it's all there.
We took out part of the shoulder blade. - Yeah.
- And some paddle digits and some of the vertebrae,
that were inside of the head and you could see there was more bones going in.
So I'm sure the whole animal is there.
What are the other things that have been uncovered on this stretch
of the Jurassic Coast?
Well, world’s first ammonite eggs.
Everyone knows what an ammonite is, a squid in a shell.
We found the world’s first ammonite eggs.
Flying reptile remains. Lots and lots of that.
Ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, pliosaurs, fish.
I mean, fish, we got a vast range of fish.
Invertebrates are interesting as well.
So my prime aim is to collect the whole diverse assembly as to what was living at that time,
from the Kimmeridge region.
But if people want to visit this part of the world, what advice would you give to
sort of amateurs that want to get a little taste of what it's like
to walk around here?
Well, come to this center first, for a start.
You’ll then see the range of material.
You’ve got also, in West Dorset, you've got the Phil Pott Museum there.
They've got a range of material there.
I mean, basically people can come all the way along the Jurassic Coast
and pick up a fossil pretty much anywhere along the length of it.
You know, whether it's a crushed ammonite, a piece of a fossil squid
- Oyster. - There’s fossils all the way along it.
- And thank you so much for taking the time to take us through it today.
It's been incredible to see and I'm sure people can’t wait to come and visit it.
- Well done. - Well worth a look isnt it?
- It is.
So getting the skull of a giant sea monster out of a cliff face,
not a very easy task, but it does make for great TV.
And you can catch the full story on the BBC in
"Attenborough and The Giant Sea Monster"