A BRIEF HISTORY OF DINOSAUR COLLECTING
ON THE ISLE OF WIGHT
by Steve Hutt

Dinosaur beginnings, their breathtaking evolutionary success and eventual demise is a fascinating story which is still unfolding. Amateur and professional palaeontologists add another chapter with each fossil found, especially on the Isle of Wight.

Dinosaur bone, footprints and footcasts represent the remains of long dead, land based reptiles. Together with rare finds of skin impressions and mineralised dung (coprolites), they are all we have to remind us of a dynamic and very long lived race of 'monsters'. Some species of dinosaurs exceeded 30 metres in length and weighed many tonnes, whilst others were minute, the size of a small house pet.

How did man's interest in dinosaurs begin?

No one knew 170 years ago what to make of large 'stone' horses found accidentally by workmen as they dug into ancient rock strata. That is - until two men working independently of each other had enough imagination and scientific training to try and make sense of these finds. But it was not until 1841 when these finds and others were formally grouped and recognised as belonging to a new order of extinct animals - Dinosaurs (terrible reptiles). The coiner of this monster sounding name was Richard Owen, the great anatomist who became the first director of the British Museum of Natural History.

The Isle of Wight proved to be a major source for the harvesting of dinosaur bones. As the cliffs of the southwest coast and Sandown Bay retreated under pounding seas and winter rain, bones fell onto the beaches. Along the 11 mile stretch of sandstone and clay, known to geologists as the Wealdon outcrop, lies Europe's most prolific reservoir of dinosaur fossils. For 160 million years, dinosaurs were as common here as cattle are today.

Dr. Gideon Mantell, a medical doctor, was an enthusiastic and diligent collector who travelled much of England looking for bones. In 1825 he had named teeth and bones found by his wife Mary in the Sussex countryside as belonging to a new type of extinct reptile, Iguanodon (Iguana -like tooth). His curiosity led him to the Isle of Wight where in 1850 he wrote: 'The quantity of bones collected from the seashore in Sandown, Brixton, Brook and Compton Bays during the last few years is very considerable; the examples I have seen and in the possession of different persons, must have belonged to between 150 and 200 individual dinosaurs.'

One local resident, William Fox, curate of Brighstone Village, was an avid collector who bought fossils from local fishermen. He corresponded regularly with Richard Owen having been introduced to him by the poet Tennyson in 1865, and acquired the rear of the first four Poliacanthi to be found on the Island. He gained the ultimate reward of having several of his finds named after him, including the 2- metre long plant eater Hypsilophondon Foxi and the armour-plated Polacanthus Foxi.

By the turn of the century Reginald Hooley, a Southampton business man, was making extraordinary finds during his frequent forays to the Island. He found a near complete skeleton of a 6 metre long Iguanodon Atherfieldensis, several incomplete skeletons and thousands of individual bones.

Today dinosaur hunting proves every bit as popular as it was a hundred years ago. Our techniques are exactly the same: knowledge of local geology, keen eyes and bags of enthusiasm and patience! Each year there are reports of exiting new finds in the media. Several years ago a new type of carnivorous dinosaur, 8 metres long, was discovered. It is still under study and is to be named shortly.

In 1992 I personally discovered the partial skeleton of a brachiosaurid (a very large, long necked plant eater) which I am carefully preparing, with several excellent volunteers, for research and display. Each new find throws a little more light onto the long lost world of the 'Terrible Reptiles'.

Steve Hutt is curator of The Sandown Museum of Isle of Wight Geology.