While scouring the glacial till that comprises England’s eastern coastal cliffs, a pair of Yorkshire fossil hunters made a colossal discovery some 180 million years in the making.
This rugged section of coast, comprised of unsorted sedimentary deposit from long-melted, once-massive glaciers, is known to yield the bones of dinosaurs and other prehistoric reptiles. Kemp’s companion that day stumbled on a glacial erratic—a hunk of exotic rock deposited from elsewhere—with a fossil that looked particularly promising.
(Top-Left) Mark Kemp; (Bottom-Left) A glacial erratic containing the fossilized partial jaw section of a temnodontosaurus; (Right) A section of cliffline in Holderness, Yorkshire. (Courtesy of Mark Kemp)
“My friend shouts me over asking for my opinion on something, as soon as I saw the rock in question, I knew it was something special,” Kemp told The Epoch Times. “I immediately knew there was bone and teeth inside and we both agreed the block should be taken by me and prepped immediately.”
A section of fossilized jawbone and teeth of an adult temnodontosaurus. (Courtesy of Mark Kemp)
This particular temnodontosaurus specimen belongs to a species known as the ichthyosaur, Kemp learned, and is “one of the best examples of this species to come from Yorkshire.”
The name “temnodontosaurus” itself from Greek translates to “cutting-tooth lizard.” And based on this specimen’s teeth and jaw size, it was estimated to have had a skull two meters long and would have been a full-sized adult.
As for Kemp, his decade-long fossil “hobby” has become a profession—running a workshop from his home in Bransholme, where he prepares fossils, improves their appearance, and preserves them for a paying clientele.
“Fossil hunting opens up your mind to what life was like all them years ago,” said Kemp. “If you split a rock open and discover a fossil, you know you’re the only human being alive to have ever seen that fossil.
“My dream is to go fossil collecting in the far corners of the world and to discover what lies locked in time.”
(Courtesy of Mark Kemp)
(Courtesy of Mark Kemp)
(Courtesy of Mark Kemp)