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.