DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: He noticed a huge tibia, maybe a metre long,

black dinosaur bone on the beach. So he went up the cliff

and quite high up in the cliff he found another bone sticking

out.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Job titles don't get much better than Namer

of Dinosaurs. And in order to name a dinosaur, you need to

have discovered a new one. We're off to the Isle of Wight, the

most prolific place for dinosaurs in Europe, to the

scene of a once-in-a-lifetime find. I'm Rosie Holdsworth, a

ranger at the National Trust. Welcome to Wild Tales and the

story of the dinosaur in the cliff.

I'm in Compton Bay on the Isle of Wight. It's an absolutely

beautiful morning, bright and breezy and early. The skylarks

are singing, I'm looking out over the calm waters of the bay

and I am here to find out a little bit more about dinosaurs,

which I'm very excited about, and I need an expert and

fortunately I've come to meet just one of those. He is Jeremy

Lockwood and he is a Namer of Dinosaurs.

He's a doctor of paleontology and I'm hoping I'm going to bump

into him just around the corner here. Good morning.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: Good morning.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: You must be Jeremy.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: I am indeed, yes. Pleased to meet you.

Pleased to meet you.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: My companion for the day, Dr Jeremy Lockwood,

is going to take me down to the beach where his friend Nick made

an incredible find in 2013. Nick, a dab hand at finding

dinosaurs, found a metre-long bone on the beach, scrambled up

the cliff directly above and found another bone. Realising he

had a potentially good amount of dinosaur on his hands, he called

in back up to excavate and Jeremy was among the team.

Little did they know at this stage what it was that they'd

discovered. In fact, it would be several years before the

significance of that day's find on this spectacular beach would

reveal itself. And we're off today back to the exact same

spot where the dinosaur that would become known as

Comptonatus chasei was found.

So looking out along this enormous stretch of sand, how

far along are we going to go?

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: Not very far. Where that little bit is

jutting out a few hundred metres away is where we're going to go.

That was where Comptonatus, this dinosaur, was found, so we

should be able to actually see the exact spot.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Brilliant

Finding dinosaur bones on the Isle of Wight isn't particularly

unusual. In the summers especially the beaches here are

filled with fossil hunters - it's one of the best places in

Europe for finds - but the discovery I'm here to find out

more about was a once in a lifetime and it wasn't just luck

The man who found it, Jeremy's long-time friend Nick, had spent

hours walking along this beach in particular, scouring for

finds for pretty much his entire adult life.

Things he found were passed on to the Dinosaur Isle Museum on

the Isle of Wight for safekeeping. But the 2013 find

was to be hugely significant. Not only would it turn out to be

one of the best preserved dinosaurs ever to be found in

the UK, it was also a new species, a new member of the

Iguanodon family. Cementing the Isle of Wight is one of the best

places to study dinosaurs.

There's a bit of a walk to get to the cliffs in question, so as

we head off along the beach, I ask Jeremy to explain exactly

what it is about the area that means dinosaur bones are so

often found here.

What is it particularly about Compton Bay that makes it so

good for dinosaur bones?

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: Probably a lot of the south-east of England

has these dinosaur beds in them. But they're all under the

ground. Yeah. And the days have gone when people dug little

quarries for every village. So these beds are exposed to the

Atlantic. And, you know, as we can see, this is eroding this

away really rapidly.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: The sea and the power of the waves are doing

the job of the old quarry workers constantly nibbling away

at the land revealing new rocks, new patches of earth.

But it's not just its position right by the coast that's

significant. For the other part of the jigsaw you've got to go

back more than 120 million years.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: The other thing is this was a river

floodplain, which is a particularly good place to find

fossils because things are rapidly buried. And we get times

where we had huge floods here.

The Cretaceous was very hot. There'd been a lot of volcanic

activity, and sea levels were rising. So we get torrential

downpours. And these are thought to bring up sheet floods which

would come down from the hills which, were probably to the

north, and just sweep everything up.

It would just bury things very rapidly with no oxygen.

We find these beds called plant debris beds and they're the ones

that we find 90 percent of the bones in and it just preserves

them in absolute beautiful condition that's why the Isle of

Wight is so perfect for dinosaur bones so it's.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Bad news for the dinosaurs, but good news for

dinosaur hunters.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: Yeah, pretty much. I'm sure a lot of them

managed to get away from the flashfloods. We do find some

fossils, which is just the legs stuck in the ground. So they

probably got stuck sometimes. So there could have been some bad

endings, yes.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: With everything I've discovered so

far, as we continue to walk along to the spot, it's fair to

say I'm feeling quite hopeful that I might find something

myself. I know it's unlikely but you never know and I have an

excellent guide by my side. As we cover the last bit of beach I

ask Jeremy how far back his love of dinosaurs stretches.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: So I'm getting on a bit now. When I was

a small boy I was really interested in fossils. I had a

friend at school right from the age of five and it was a strange

thing because no one else in the school was at all interested in

dinosaurs.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Really?

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: This was a long way before Jurassic Park.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Right yeah

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: Like this. But we always dreamed of

dinosaurs.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: His childhood interest then stretched into

adulthood. Family holidays were taken on the Isle of Wight and

his passion was reignited.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: When my children were younger, maybe

about 30 years ago, we started coming down here and walking

along and I heard there were dinosaur fossils here so I

started looking, and started finding dinosaur bones and it

just rekindled all that, all that interest.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: All excitement of it?

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: All the excitement.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: The holidays were a break from Jeremy's

demanding job as a doctor.

A job that would go on to eventually help him in dinosaur

identification.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: So I was a general practitioner in the

Midlands. I did that for 30 years. Before that I'd been a

junior doctor for quite a long time. I quite enjoyed working in

accident and emergency.

The problem with medicine is once you've retired you can't

use your knowledge. You can't carry on teaching and I enjoyed

teaching. So I thought I'll do a PhD on the dinosaurs. So I went

to Portsmouth University and spent five years doing a PhD.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Amazing.

So with the medical training and the history as a GP, did that

help you at all in kind of determining the different

species and the different types of bones you were finding?

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: I did a little bit of surgery before

general practice. So as a medical student, I learned a lot

of anatomy. Dinosaur anatomies and human anatomies are...

Really very different.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Yeah.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: But they've got the same sort of names and,

you know, a lot of the parts are the same. So, yes, that was

quite helpful.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: And with that, we're at the spot.

Have a scramble about.

Before Jeremy tells me about the day of the find, we scramble up

the cliff to see if we can find anything today. My heart's

racing. I'm half thinking I'm going to find something. I'm

definitely going to find something. And then equally

thinking there's absolutely no way I'll find anything.

But we're searching in April and the winter storms have been

having a good go at the cliffs. Even seasoned all-weather

lifelong beachgoer Fossil Hunter Jeremy is shocked by how much.

You can hear it in his voice.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: This is absolutely phenomenal.

This debris bed has been taken back more than in years.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: I can't imagine how on earth you would

ever spot anything in here because it's you having to

concentrate so hard on not falling over or tumbling down,

down onto the beach, that keeping an eye out for tiny

fragments of bone is quite the skill and it really is a jumble

of all sorts of different colours of mud and all that

organic material.

How on earth you start to look for things I really don't know.

And then, something to show me. But what's he seen?

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: Ok.

When these floods occurred, a lot of the stuff that came down

with the bones, most of it was plant debris, and because it was

buried so rapidly it didn't deteriorate and we get sort of

black...

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: I was going to say is that this black is that

because it's organic matter?

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: Yes if we look down in here, exactly.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Oh wow yeah oh my goodness.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: So there you can see there so that's 125

million year old piece of wood and sometimes we get charcoal so

there must have been a lot of forest fires going on at some

point or another. Yes it's all It's slumped down but everything

has just collapsed in the last few weeks here.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Then Jeremy finds something else.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: So we have an oyster here. So that's from

the sea, so that's probably from higher up and has washed down.

So that's about a 120 million year old oyster.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: And after a bit more scrambling we're in a

much better spot to see where Comptonatus Chasei was dug out.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: You can see the main part of the cliff

there. Not the very top bit, but the main cliff is a sort of

pinky brown colour.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Yeah.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: And that's very typical of soil. But we've

got that grey layer underneath it. And that's the layer that

held the Comptonatus.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Right.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: And in fact, this bit here is some of the

stuff we dug out.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Oh, wow. Okay.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: So just as we go around the corner up

there, that's where we had to dig. Which wasn't too bad

because we're not too far from the top of the cliff.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: And Nick, Jeremy and the rest of the crew

made plenty of trips to the top of the cliff as they kept

finding more and more bones. The find was, for Nick especially,

the culmination of a lifelong passion.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: Nick Chase spent his whole life almost,

since his 20s, to well into his 60s, collecting dinosaurs here.

Every day he came down and collected and formed a

phenomenal collection which he gave to the museum.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: And then, that day in 2013, a huge bone was

waiting for him.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: He was walking along here, he noticed a

huge tibia, maybe a metre long, black dinosaur bone on the

beach. So he went up the cliff and quite high up in the cliff

he found another bone sticking out so he alerted the museum.

Luckily I was around at that time so we all came down and

started digging away.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Then there's several stages of excavation to

go through.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: So the first thing to do is we remove the

overburden so pickaxes and spades and move all the top away

and then pickaxes and shovels are thrown away and trowels and

knives and smaller instruments are taken out.

And when you start finding bones then you would put something on

top of it like foil and then we would run down to the beach and

get a bucket of water and hessian and put that into

plaster of Paris and start to cover the top of it and then we

dig underneath it and then we can hopefully flip this thing

over onto the hardened plaster put more covering on the the

other side and put more plaster of Paris.

As long as it's four of us we put it in a blanket or something

like that you know and try and struggle up to the top of the

cliff and get to the path and get it down.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: What the team found and excavated in 2013 was

officially handed over to the museum the Dinosaur Isle Museum

in Sandown, the other side of the island to where we are now.

It, then took them two years to clean all the bones.

There were a lot of them. In fact Nick and the team were to

go on to discover that their dinosaur was the most complete

skeleton found in the UK in 100 years. There were bits missing,

including the top of a tibia. But incredibly, four years after

Nick's original find, Jeremy made his own remarkable

discovery.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: I was walking along here and found a

top of a tibia.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: No way

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: And it slotted perfectly in there.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Wow That must have felt amazing, being able

to...

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: Oh it was a nice feeling,

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: That moment of putting the two together.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: I showed it to Nick and he said I'm sure

that's exactly the right bit that's missing from there and

indeed it did just slot together absolutely perfectly.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: It was another bit of their Iguanodon but at

this stage Jeremy and the team don't realise they've just dug

up a new species, still to be named by Jeremy as Comptonatus

chasei, a new member of the Iguanodon family.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: On the island, nearly all the fossils

of dinosaurs you find are from Iguanodontians. They were very

much the major, the dominant group of dinosaurs on the

island. Some people call them the cattle of the Cretaceous,

because they probably went around in herds, because we find

lots of footprints of these, we've got a lot of them on the

island.

And it would seem sensible that for a big animal, I mean

Comptonatus is probably about the size of the American bison.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Right, wow. ...

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: and where you find cattle and bison and

things like that, they tend to be in herds because it's a good

way of protecting themselves and their young from predators.

One of the markers on them, certainly on more of the later

ones and certainly on Comptonatus, is the thumb

spikes.

So these were these dinosaurs that had thumb spikes, heavy

animals. So if you were wanting to attack an Iguanodontian that

was in a herd, you had to be very careful because, you know,

you could have a whole ton of something charging at you and

maybe several of them at once. So it could have been quite a

dangerous game.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Finding the most complete dinosaur in 100

years is a pretty good thing to put on your CV. But that's not

the end of the story for this dinosaur because COVID is about

to hit.

And while the country goes into lockdown, Jeremy goes into

self-inflicted solitary confinement at the museum, head

down, poring over countless dinosaur bones. But how long

does it take to discover you've just dug up the bones of a whole

new species of dinosaur?

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: Well, there are people out there probably

who could have done it very much more quickly than me. But it

took me the best part of five years to develop the knowledge.

So I started going through Iguanodontian bones in the

collection in the museum, but through other museums, through

the whole of the Natural History Museum, which is looking at

thousands of bones, photographing them, measuring

them, describing them.

So it took me quite a long time to get to the point where I had

that confidence to say, this is different. I've seen enough of

these animals now to know that these are different features on

it. And that allowed me then to... discuss with my

supervisors this and everyone agreed that this was a new

animal.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: It was an incredible discovery, amazing,

once in a lifetime. But for the man behind it all, it was...

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: Something to do during Covid, because a lot

of it's reading, just reading papers, and it's comparing it to

all the other dinosaurs in the world, the Iguanodontians in the

world, so you need a thorough knowledge of that.

So, yes, I think my wife had felt that we were coming to

retire on the Isle of Wight and as we got here we suddenly found

that we're in the midst of an epidemic. I was totally obsessed

with dinosaurs.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: So this might be a slightly cheeky question

but it sounds like it's a very long and drawn out process with

a lot of kind of staring at probably fairly dry scientific

papers and some very minute bits of bone. Did you not get a

little bit bored?

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: No not at all. It just kept me awake at

night that was a problem because if you're trying to define a new

species or look at things it just, you have to be totally

obsessed by it you know it it just takes over your life really

because it's it's a bit like a detective I felt you know you

you know you're looking for clues and things like that and

you sort of wake up in the middle and say oh that that was

a bit different.

And so I found that really exciting. I'm not sure the

people around me found it quite so exciting. I know my wife, you

know you get swear boxes.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Yeah.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: And my wife made a box which was talking to

people about dinosaurs and they didn't ask you to.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Unsolicited dinosaur comments. Yeah. And has

she forgiven you after you...

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: I think so.

Yes, I mean, I could have spent five years and said, no,

everyone was right all along and there's no new species here, you

know, which would have been a good scientific result, but not

quite as fun as actually saying, you know, here's a new dinosaur

and that. Yeah, I was just very lucky.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: But it wasn't just luck behind Jeremy's COVID

discovery. That GP background, the early career specialising in

anatomy and then the PhD.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: So I chose for my PhD to do taxonomy.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Right.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: Which is really just looking at hundreds

and hundreds of bones to get a really good feel of what the

variation was in them. And that's when I suddenly started

to find that one had a bulbous nose. You know, well, none of

the others have got a bulbous nose. So this looks pretty

obvious that this is a different animal. And it had quite

numerous other differences as well when we look closely.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Jeremy's COVID work was, in his own words,

scrutinised by peers and the Natural History Museum, before

he was then able to declare that he had indeed identified a new

species.

There was still the fun bit of naming it, but as we headed back

along the beach, and not forgetting I was on my own side

hustle to find a bit of 120 million year old natural

history, we have one last scramble about. And at the base

of the steps back to the car park, Jeremy spots a clue high

in the cliffs.

Is it that very shallow layer?

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: So we've got our early Cretaceous dinosaur

beds ending, and on top of it there's this gravel, and then

above the gravel, can you see there's a sort of darkish layer

before we get to more modern soil, and it was part of a

woodland.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Which leads us to look down at our feet.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: And we do find nuts, hazelnuts.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Amazing.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: And they used to be known in early

Georgian times, or even earlier I think, as Noah's nuts, because

people believed this must have been the Great Flood, which you

can perfectly understand.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Definitely, yeah.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: There's this layer of woodland below this.

So, there's been a bit of a collapse of it, and if you look

in there...

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: I was going to say...

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: I'll let you be the first to find one.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Is that a nut? It's a nut It's a hazelnut Yes.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: Be very careful with them.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Wow

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: I think there's quite a few of them

though.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: They're so cool, yeah, look

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: But be gentle with them. They do dry

out.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Oh, they're really cool.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: There we go.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Yeah.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: And, I mean, sometimes we find little

gnawings in them where...

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: A little ancient mouse.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: An ancient mouse or something has had a

nibble.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Oh, well we didn't find dinosaur bones but

we did find Noah's nuts.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: Noah's nuts.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: That makes me very happy.

With my Noah's nuts gently in my hand and the beach rapidly

disappearing behind us, there's just one more thing to ask

Jeremy. How do you come up with a name for a new species of

dinosaur?

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: Well, it's one of the nice bits of

discovering a new species.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Comptonatus Chasei is the name Jeremy chose.

And as we look back down on Compton Bay, he talks me through

the Comptonatus bit first.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: I wanted to reflect that it was found on the

Isle of Wight, so I thought Compton sounded a good place to

start. So I had to put something, I couldn't just call

it Compton, it has to have a sort of Latin ending.

So I was thinking of words that might fit with that and there's

that tonere or tonatus in Latin means thundered and I imagine

from all the footprints we're seeing that this animal

Comptonatus was probably was in a herd and if it was spooked or

something like that it probably did thunder through the river

plains of the early Cretaceous. And then Chasei means really

Chase's Compton Thunderer.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: But there was another reason to go with

Chasei, Jeremy's friend Nick, Nick Chase.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: Nick spent his whole life in pretty much

with very, very little money. He qualified at the university in a

biological sciences degree and then just spent the rest of his

life going to Compton once or twice a day and collecting

everything and not keeping it himself, but actually putting it

into the museum. I think if someone's found something, it's

nice to name that dinosaur after them, really.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Nick died of cancer in 2019, just before

Covid swept across the world and Jeremy got his head down at the

museum.

DR JEREMY LOCKWOOD: He was a phenomenal man. I mean, he had a

son, Will, and his sister, Sarah. They were so proud of the

fact that he was such a good collector of dinosaurs and he

was tremendously knowledgeable about them. He did get the Mary

Anning Award from the Paleontological Association,

which is the highest award you could get as an amateur.

But I think it was really the icing on the cake to actually

have a dinosaur named after a man who'd contributed so much to

dinosaur research. Yeah, I think they were very delighted and

proud of him for it.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: That's lovely. It's been a really, really

wonderful day. So thank you so much for taking the time and

showing us around.

It's been an absolute pleasure.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Wild Tales with me,

Rosie Holdsworth. Why not check out the episode show notes and

I'll leave a link to the beach we went to, where we parked and

where you can see Nick and Jeremy's dinosaur. And you can

find us on Instagram at wildtalesnt.

See you next time.