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The Death of God?

England's 'Jurassic Coast' Yields Subversive Dinosaur Fossils

By Marco Evers

Reminders of the prehistoric past keep surfacing in a rich dinosaur graveyard in southern England. What a girl named Mary Anning found there in the 1800s began to dismantle the Bible's account of creation -- and anticipated the theory of evolution.

During the stormiest weather, when the sea thrashes the steep coastline of southern England, demolishing entire limestone cliffs, Chris Moore likes to go hunting for big game -- big, long-dead game.

Moore waits for low tide, then sets out along the beach off Charmouth on England's Channel coast. It's a unique place. In precisely the same spot where tourists like to bake in the summer sun, winter storms expose the sometimes meter-long pieces of fossilized carcasses of prehistoric creatures. Rarely, though, are the remains in one piece.

These apparitions are time travelers from a lost world. They're the fossilized remains of prehistoric lizards, giant fish and dinosaurs. The sea has flushed them out of their graves in England's cliffs. Many of them have not been exposed to light for 200 million years, and the moment Moore finds them is either their moment of loss or resurrection.

He has a trained eye, and he knows time is of the essence whenever he finds anything -- because whatever he can't retrieve before the tide rises will likely disappear into the ocean forever. His finds range from petrified skulls to entire ribcages. Sometimes getting to his treasure involves a lot of digging and chiseling. Sometimes he's lucky enough to find individual bones protruding from a cliff wall. And sometimes, of course, he finds nothing.

His work is difficult and dangerous. Standing beneath the weakened cliffs means standing in the path of possible landslides and mudslides, and the mud at the base of the cliffs can be as treacherous as quicksand. But Moore -- at 49 an old hand at his job -- still hasn't had enough. "You can always find something new here," he says.

When he isn't out searching for bones, Moore spends his days in his workshop, a sort of ICU for dinosaurs. It's filled with rocks and bones, bits of vertebrae and fins, dust and noise. Moore uses drills and sandblasting equipment to remove the rock encasing the bones -- with the help of Alex, his 23-year-old son and assistant.

Preparing each of the prehistoric carcasses, says Moore, requires "hundreds of hours of work." He sells the finished product to researchers, collectors and even decorators, sometimes for tens of thousands of pounds. Moore's works are on display at the Natural History Museum in London, as well as in museums in Tokyo and Toronto. He was the first to discover three types of fish dinosaurs, and one of them, Leptonectes moorei, is even named after him.

Charmouth, the village where Moore lives, is home to one of the world's richest deposits of fossils. It is also one of the cradles of geology and paleontology. It was here that Moore's predecessors, especially a poverty-stricken woman named Mary Anning, hit upon finds close to 200 years ago that revolutionized man's knowledge of the history of life -- and began to unravel the Old Testament's account of creation, years before naturalist Charles Darwin established the foundation for what some call a "godless world" with his theory of evolution.

If God is indeed dead, the beasts embedded in the rock at Charmouth are at least partly to blame.

'Jurassic Coast'

Nowadays the remains of these creatures are responsible for the livelihood of a number of people. In addition to Moore, seven other so-called "fossil hunters" make a living uncovering the bones of these prehistoric animals, though not all of them are as lucky as Tony Gill. He became a local celebrity when he found a giant fish lizard fossil near the parking lot in front of his shop. The snout of this 12-meter (39-foot) creature, lined with razor-sharp teeth, is as long as a human leg and has eye sockets larger than large hands.

Tens of thousands of tourists come to Charmouth each year to hunt for the remains of prehistoric fauna. Freelance biologist Colin Dawes guides hundreds of amateur paleontologists through the bizarre fossil graveyard every week. Under his guidance, even children are able to find fossils as easily as they might find shells. A cantankerous man dressed in an Indiana Jones-like outfit, Dawes regales the children with stories about the great Darwin, all the while giving them a lesson in natural selection and how it has been responsible for the constant emergence of new species. Sometimes Dawes encounters outraged parents, who prefer to have their children hear the Biblical story of creation, not the scientific version.

Tourism officials have come up with their own name for this segment of the English coast in East Devon and County Dorset: "Jurassic Coast." The region has even been named a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage site, along with places like the Great Barrier Reef and the Grand Canyon. The Jurassic Coast is a history book of the earth and of life itself. More than any other place on earth, this 150-kilometer (94-mile) coastal strip discloses the Mesozoic Era, which encompasses the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, in all of its splendor and horror.

The first sediments date from a period more than 250 million years ago. A massive planetary extinction had just occurred, leading to conditions that allowed the dinosaurs to develop and thrive. The most recent sediments date from about 65 million years ago, when dinosaurs became extinct, paving the way for mammals to take their place as the planet's dominant species. Early dramas of evolution unfolded in this 185-million-year period between the two mass extinctions. Like tree rings, the sediments along the Jurassic Coast enable scientists to piece together a detailed account of this era, including the rise and fall of powerful species, the refinement of life into niches, adaptation to climate change, mass extinction and the demise of some species and birth of others.