Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre in Dorset will display the fossilised remains of a 200-million-year-old ichthyosaur through 2018.
The enormous creature starred in the BBC documentary Attenborough and the Sea Dragon in January this year. Visit charmouth.org
Since Jurassic times until late 2016, the creature had been buried in the cliffs above Monmouth Beach near Lyme Regis, just four miles from Charmouth, at the heart of the Jurassic Coast, the first natural UNESCO World Heritage Site designated in the UK and one of the most important geological sites in the world.
Part of the front paddles of the ichthyosaur were first spotted by experienced local fossil collector, Chris Moore, in January 2016.
Sir David Attenborough closely followed the excavation, extraction and investigation, and documented the remarkable discovery in the hour-long BBC special ‘Attenborough and the Sea Dragon’, which aired in January 2018.
Free to enter, Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre was set up in 1985 to encourage safe and sustainable collecting of fossils from the local beaches.
Visitors can continue their voyage of Jurassic discovery at Dorset County Museum, where Dippy the dinosaur is on display until 7 May.
Dippy on Tour: A Natural History Adventure is taking Dippy, the Natural History Museum’s iconic 21.3-metre-long Diplodocus skeleton cast, to Dorset County Museum as the first stop in a tour around the country to spark the imagination of the next generation of scientists and connect the nation with nature.
