Brief
Skip to main content Skip to navigation Close dialogue 1 / 4 Next image Previous image Toggle caption Print subscriptions Search jobs Sign in Eur Europe edition UK edition US edition Australia edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home The Guardian News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle Show more Hide expanded menu News View all News World news UK news Climate crisis Ukraine Environment Science Global development Football Tech Business Obituaries Opinion View all Opinion The Guardian view Columnists Cartoons Opinion videos Letters Sport View all Sport Football Cricket Rugby union Tennis Cycling F1 Golf US sports Culture View all Culture Books Music TV & radio Art & design Film Games Classical Stage Lifestyle View all Lifestyle Fashion Food Recipes Love & sex Health & fitness Home & garden Women Men Family Travel Money Search input google-search Search Support us Print subscriptions Search jobs Holidays Digital Archive Guardian Licensing Live events About Us The Guardian app Video Podcasts Pictures Newsletters Today's paper Inside the Guardian Guardian Weekly Crosswords Wordiply Corrections Tips Search input google-search Search Search jobs Holidays Digital Archive Guardian Licensing Live events About Us UK UK politics Education Media Society Law Scotland Wales Northern Ireland Matthew Myerscough with the rear paddle from a plesiosaur – possibly a Thalassiodracon or ‘sea dragon’ – that he found in Somerset. Photograph: Ceri Oakes View image in fullscreen Matthew Myerscough with the rear paddle from a plesiosaur – possibly a Thalassiodracon or ‘sea dragon’ – that he found in Somerset. Photograph: Ceri Oakes Seascape: the state of our oceans Fossils How one man’s near-death experience led to the discovery of the first Jurassic sea dragon in Wales Matthew Myerscough’s remarkable find is one of many detailed in his new book. But his journey into fossil hunting began years earlier, when he was caught in an avalanche Seascape: the state of our oceans is supported by About this content Donna Ferguson Tue 28 Jul 2026 11.00 CEST Last modified on Tue 28 Jul 2026 11.01 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google W hen Matthew Myerscough walks along a beach, he cannot help hunting for fossils. “I think my fossil radar is always on – even if I’m not looking, it’s hard sometimes to not see things,” says the 40-year-old civil engineer, who has discovered thousands of fossils on British beaches. It was while he was “not looking” on Lavernock beach near Penarth, south Wales , that he recently stumbled across the fossilised bone of an early type of plesiosaur, a marine reptile that roamed the oceans while dinosaurs stalked the land during the early Jurassic period. Encased in hard limestone bedrock, the 201m-year-old jaw – with its unusual spoon-shaped end – once belonged to “a sea dragon” known as a rhomaleosaur, and was the first of its kind found in Wales. “That was an amazing discovery; a really, really exciting find, by complete chance,” says Myerscough. He initially strolled past the fossil with two fellow fossil hunters, then decided to return for a closer look. “There were so many places we could have walked that day. And when I think about the research paper being done at the moment about that fossil, and everything that we will learn, everything that will be understood from finding it – none of that would have been possible if we’d been 3ft to the left.” View image in fullscreen Walking up from Port Mulgrave, North Yorkshire. Photograph: Ceri Oakes For Myerscough, however, fossil hunting is not just about finding fossils. It is tied to his recovery from a terrifying near-death experience. In February 2014, he was hiking up Yr Wyddfa (also known as Snowdon) in north Wales when he was thrown off a small cliff during an avalanche. He will never forget the feeling of being airborne, he says, and then being “compressed in the snow” when he came to a halt, unable to tell which way was up. “It was like being cast inside a block of concrete, I couldn’t move any part of my body. I couldn’t move a fingertip.” He was discovered unconscious, barely breathing, 20 minutes later, buried beneath more than a metre of snow. He had fallen 300 metres. Badly bruised and shaken but miraculously uninjured, it took him only a few days to recover physically after he was rescued from the mountain. But he found his thoughts returning repeatedly to the accident, the near-misses, the what-ifs. View image in fullscreen An ichthyosaur fossil from the Lower Lias – marine geological layers of limestone, shale, clay and mudstone from the Triassic and Jurassic periods – found in Somerset. Photograph: Ceri Oakes It was in the aftermath of this experience that he turned to fossil hunting, which he had first enjoyed as a boy during holidays in Whitby on the Yorkshire coast. It proved to be the distraction he needed to escape his negative thoughts. “There’s this mindful, almost meditative state that I get into because I’m forgetting about all the other stresses and worries in life. I’m so focused on what I’m doing in that moment and what I’m searching for.” Scanning the rocks for inconspicuous – and often almost imperceptible – signs of fossils takes a lot of concentration. And there is something he finds particularly soothing about fossil hunting beside the sea. “When I’m there, I feel this connection [to the ocean], imagining this life in the distant past,” he says. “Finding a huge skull full of razor-sharp teeth and an enormous eye from an extinct sea monster from millions of years ago – it’s so exciting.” View image in fullscreen A row of ichthyosaur vertebrae found in North Yorkshire, where Myerscough first hunted for fossils as a boy. Photograph: Ceri Oakes Since he started fossil hunting, he has chanced upon some extraordinarily rare finds, including a plesiosaur flipper, a huge dinosaur footprint and an ichthyosaur forefin and skull. He details how and where in the UK he discovered each of his “star finds” in his recent book, In Search of Sea Dragons: A Fossil Hunter’s Odyssey. In doing so, he sheds light on the secretive world of fossil hunting – a world in which most collectors and avocational palaeontologists choose not to reveal the locations of their most exciting and valuable finds, knowing that another important piece of the fossil may one day turn up there after a storm or a cliff fall. Myerscough, by contrast, wants to share everything he has learned about fossil hunting with the world. His top tip for those trying out fossil hunting for the first time is to go on a guided tour. “They [experts] can show you [fossils] on the beach,” he says. Once you start seeing fossils, “you start seeing them everywhere.” But he warns that the pastime can be just as physically demanding as mountaineering. He often carries large rocks or even boulders long distances by foot, as well as different hammers and a chisel. “You can end up with a heavy bag – even if you don’t find many fossils.” There are also dangers around fossil hunting on beaches, mostly due to unpredictable cliff falls and rising tides. These risks need to be considered and mitigated, he says – for example, by always going fossil hunting on a falling tide. He also discourages people from going close to the cliffs to pick around in fresh falls, when fossils are more often than not covered in mud. “The best finds are after the sea has cleaned the material, so you can see the sides of the rock.” Voyage to the end of the world: floating lab to explore life in Arctic adrift in ice Read more Many of the rare fossils he has found were in “well-worn” blocks of rock, he reveals. “Some of them have been on the beach, I’m sure, for decades, rolling around.” He suspects that, after falling from the cliff, they became buried in big banks of shingle or among other rocks, and were exposed as the sea gradually shifted these rocks around. In this way, he sees fossils as “gifts from nature” and hopes his book will help more people to discover the joy of finding these offerings at the seaside. “The luck of finding these things is just extraordinary,” he says. “When you think about the events that needed to happen, all those millions of years ago, for something to be fossilised, it seems remarkable. And then for this fossil to be exposed once again on the Earth’s surface, in the cliffs, then on the beach, and then to be found by someone … the odds of all of those things happening seems remarkable, too.” In Search of Sea Dragons by Matthew Myerscough is published by Seren Books Explore more on these topics Fossils Seascape: the state of our oceans Wales Evolution Biology features Share Reuse this content Most viewed Most viewed UK UK politics Education Media Society Law Scotland Wales Northern Ireland News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning Sign up for our email About us Help Complaints & corrections Contact us Tip us off SecureDrop Privacy policy Cookie policy Tax strategy Terms & conditions All topics All writers Newsletters Digital newspaper archive Bluesky Facebook Instagram LinkedIn Threads TikTok YouTube Advertise with us Search UK jobs Tips Accessibility settings Work with us Back to top © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. 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