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70,000,000 years ago the world was dominated by dinosaurs. They filled the skies, the land and the seas.
Then they disappeared. Suddenly.
The Isle of Purbeck bears witness to their past presence. There was Nuthetes a small
flesh-eater, Echinodon which was one of the smallest dinosaurs measuring less than
a metre in length and then at the other extreme there was Megalosaurus.
GREAT LIZARD
It is Megalosaurus, a member of a bigger family of dinosaurs, which is perhaps most
commonly thought of as representative of the dinosaurs which inhabited the Isle of Purbeck. It was a large meat-eater
with an estimated weight of one ton. It's short muscular neck supported a large head with powerful hinged jaws
armed with serrated teeth. It moved on two legs - a biped - with short arms and clawed fingers. No complete skeleton
of Megalosaurus has ever been found but it is because of the well-preserved footprints
which have been found in the Purbeck area that light has been shed on its movements and habits.
It is the limestone hills of the area which have ensured that there are more examples of dinosaurs footprints in
this area than anywhere else in England. They appear in what are almost certainly mud cracks that were baked by
some extreme heat into an eternal momento which can still be seen today. It would seem the dinosaurs were in shallow
water just deep enough to keep their tails afloat. The animals that left the prints behind were on the move, perhaps
on the run.
Elsewhere in the area bones which have washed up from the sea suggest there may be a graveyard of dinosaurs lying
somewhere off shore in the Northern part of Swanage Bay.
It is unlikely that if such a graveyard exists it will ever be unearthed. The sea around the Isle would be expensive
to explore and it is only the oil companies who can seemingly afford the cash to reap any riches which the prehistoric
past of the area can offer. Indeed even though dozens of dinosaur tracks have been discovered on the island only
a handful have been saved and most of these have been obliterated by the weather and the passage of time. As late
as 1963 the British Museum intervened to preserve some undamaged sections and tried to locate more in areas such
as Langton Matravers in the following two years.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW ?
It is not know what happened to the dinosaurs. Received scientific opinion seemingly converges around the belief
that the Earth was hit by an asteroid which produced an explosion a thousand billion times the strength of the
bomb the USA dropped on Hiroshima in the mid 1940s as a military experiment to test newly discovered technology.
Earlier theories had suggested it was the evolutionnary strategies of mammals, feeding of the eggs of dinosaurs,
which led to their demise. And then perhaps the resources they drew on may have dried up….
Whatever the truth the dinosaurs lived in this area once and at the time were well adapted to the environment.
Whether their demise was a result of some unavoidable natural catastrophe or the rise of a class of animals which
proved parasitic is a mute question : they were part of the evolutionnary story of the planet. One thing is for
sure. Their demise was not self-inflicted.
And there the story ends. The story of the dinosaurs has captured people's imaginations for many years. This could
be for several reasons - a romatic passion for the unknowable, an interest in the first near-intelligent life form
to inhabit the planet, a story of survival and demise which could serve mythological longings.
If the later we would do well to consider our position in the cosmic scale of things ; our relationship to new,
perhaps non-carbon algorithmic coding sytems or the way we draw on the limited resources we are dependent upon
and which are non-renewable : perhaps it is the car which will prove the new egg-eater.
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