Thank you to all our sponsors
Fossil Festival 2012
Information on this year's festival will be posted here very soon, in the meantime read about last year's festival "Marine Parade".
Marine Parade
‘Marine Parade’, the 2011 Lyme Regis Fossil Festival, celebrates both our Jurassic Sea heritage and the spectacular diversity of life in Lyme Bay today. When we study the rocks in the cliffs along our coast today we are studying the remains of the seas that existed millions of years ago. The Jurassic Coast’s UNESCO World Heritage status rests on the unique tableau that we see today, displayed for us to admire thanks to the unimaginably slow geological processes and the active, dynamic relationship between the cliffs and the sea.
This year our Festival partners will bring you both the ancient and the modern. Marine fossils will bump into seafood, along with many other Lyme Bay inhabitants that you really wouldn’t want to eat.
Ancient seas
During the Jurassic period, 140-200 million years ago, the supercontinent Pangaea began to break apart. Earth was relatively warm, and sea levels varied, rising and and falling several times over millions of years. At some points they were very high with hardly any polar ice caps, some times shallower with islands and shoals similar to the Caribbean today, and other times much shallower, with coastal lagoons or even forests. Travelling along the World Heritage Site today, from Exmouth to Studland Bay, you can see the remains of many different ancient environments captured by the rocks, from the Triassic deserts (in the west) to the Cretaceous swamps and swamps (in the east), but between them lies the rich diversity of Jurassic marine habitats – beaches, river deltas, tropical lagoons, deep seas – our rocks have got it all!
The expansion of shallow seas encouraged an explosion of life in the Jurassic, and many animals evolved rapidly in order to take advantage of the new habitats available. Reptiles dominated the world. The dinosaurs ruled the land while the giant marine reptiles like Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs and Pliosaurs stalked the oceans. Above them all the flying reptiles soared, filling the skies millions of years before birds first appeared.
Jurassic Lyme
The rocks in the cliffs at Lyme Regis represent layers from the oldest part of the Jurassic period and were layed down at the bottom of a deep sea between 200 and 195 million years ago. The nature of the rocks and the fossils contained within them points to a deep sea populated mostly by swimming creatures like ammonites, belemnites, fish, ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. We know that this part of the world was much closer to the equator at the beginning of the Jurassic so it must have been a tropical sea. There were not very many creatures living on the sea bed because it was stagnant and they could not survive there.
A stagnant seabed sounds pretty unpleasant, but it’s the perfect environment to preserve the remains of creatures as fossils. Sometimes fossils from these layers are so well preserved that traces of the skin can still be seen! The quality of fossils and their abundance in these rocks means that the cliffs around Lyme Regis are recognised as perhaps the richest source of lower Jurassic giant marine reptiles, fish and insects anywhere in the world.
Lyme Bay today – on land and sea
Virtually all of the land in the World Heritage Site has legal protection, including 14 Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), a National Nature Reserve, 66 Geological Conservation Review (GCR) sites of national and international importance and the Dorset and East Devon Areas of Outstanding National Beautry (AONB). The Fleet Lagoon and Exe Estuary are European wetland sites protected as RAMSAR sites.
Erosion is the key feature that maintains both geological and biological interests along the coast. Continued erosion maintains the rock outcrops within the cliffs and delivers fossils to the beaches. Erosion itself forms part of the justification for World Heritage Status in that this coast is a ‘living laboratory' for geomorphology as it contains superb examples of landslides, beaches, lagoons, bays and headlands and sea stacks. Much of the biological interest is in the form of plants and animals that colonise this constantly changing environment.
Even the sea is protected around these parts, and for good reason. Lyme Bay is one of the finest marine wildlife sites in the UK, home to around 300 recorded species of plants and animals, including dense populations of the nationally protected pink seafan and the extremely rare sunset coral. As well as a haven for sponges, starfish and coral, the reefs also support a range of seafood animals, including crab, lobster and scallops. In June 2008 Defra (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) introduced a new 60 square mile exclusion zone in Lyme Bay – the first of its kind on this scale in the UK. The Marine Institute at Plymouth University is monitoring the environemental and socio-economic effects of this marine special protected area. It’s vitally important to do both – we want a healthy fishing community as well as a healthy sea! – and the Festival will give visitors a chance to learn how to become better environmental stewards but also more sustainable seafood consumers.