The Yorkshire Coast is known as the ‘Dinosaur Coast’. 170 million years ago the land that is now Scarborough was in a very different location – around where Morocco is today. At the beginning of the Jurassic period this area was covered by warm tropical seas, which became river deltas as sea levels sank. The seas were home to ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. In the deltas, a variety of dinosaurs, such as plant-eating sauropods and carnivorous theropods, flourished.
Dinosaurs left footprints in the sand, silt and mud of the beaches and river deltas. Dinosaur footprints can be seen on shore rocks at Burniston and Scalby near Scarborough. Although finding dinosaur bones is extremely rare along the Yorkshire Coast, the footbone of a sauropod has been found at Scarborough.
In April 2021, the largest dinosaur footprint ever found in Yorkshire (80 cm or 31½ in) was spotted by a member of the public in the Burniston area near Scarborough. Experts believe it was left by a large meat-eating dinosaur, possibly a Megalosaurus, with a body length of up to 9m (30 ft). It lived around 166 million years ago. It had been discovered in 2020 by a fossil collector, but its importance had initially gone unnoticed.
Some of these dinosaur footprints can be found in Scarborough’s Rotunda Museum, situated on Valley Road next to the Spa Bridge in South Bay. It opened in 1829, and was founded by the Scarborough Philosophical Society employing a design put forward by Scarborough resident William Smith, ‘the Father of English Geology’. Smith created the first geological map of England, Wales and parts of Scotland and a copy can be seen in the Rotunda. The building was one of the world’s first purpose-built museums and houses one of the finest collections of Jurassic geology on the Yorkshire Coast.
In the Georgian gallery, visitors can admire a frieze created by John Phillips, the nephew of William Smith, and author of one of the world’s first local geological books. The Speeton Plesiosaur, discovered in Speeton, Filey, by a fossil collector in 2001, is a 4.5m (15 ft) skeleton of a rarely found Lower Cretaceous plesiosaur. Almost complete, apart from its head, this specimen was donated to the Rotunda.
