A series of massive storms has brought a wave of dinosaur enthusiasts and fossil hunters to the southeast coast of England to find remnants of Earth's prehistoric creatures.
After torrential downpours stormed Dorset, UK, multiple areas of the cliffside known as the “Jurassic Coast” eroded, revealing more fossils than usual — most notably a five-foot, 200 million-year old ichthyosaur (a dolphin-like marine reptile) found on Boxing Day.
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With the new discoveries found in the cliffside, preservation and treatment of the fossils remain a major concern for professionals as amateur fossil hunters who lack the proper training on how to handle fossils have been frequenting the coast.
“We've had people come up the center here with a pile of rocks in their hands which turns out to be something really kind of special and important, but they've just smashed it to pieces,” paleontologist Phil Davidson with the Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre told BBC News.
The crazed fossil hunters are climbing the muddy cliffsides in the hopes of finding something rare, but not without serious risk of injury. Because of the severe weather that made the fossils surface, officials of the West Dorset District Council reminded hunters that the chances of landslides and rock slides have increased.
“Unfortunately a small number of people do climb up into the cliffs and there are two hazards there,” Richard Edmond of the Jurassic Coast Team told BBC News. “One is falling rock but the other one is mudslides and quick sands. We do actually end up rescuing quite a few number of people.”
The “Jurassic Coast” encompasses 95 miles of coastline made of rocks from the Mesozoic Era, carved out over thousands of years of ice ages and changes in sea level. The coast is a World Heritage Site as it documents over 180 million years of geological history.
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