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Big Monster Dig

Hastings Iguanodon

Hastings Iguanodon programme | Iguanodon bernissartensis | Resources

Hastings Iguanodon programme

What sort of Iggy?
For the Hastings show the Big Monster Dig team already had half a dinosaur, so finding the rest shouldn't have been too hard, should it? Well, it probably wouldn't have been if the other half hadn't been stuck in a cliff nearly 30 metres above the beach.

The team was called in by Luke to investigate some remains of an Iguanodon found on a beach near Hastings. It was in some loose material that had fallen from a cliff following a storm and it seemed fairly likely that the rest of it was still up there. How did it live and what sort of Iggy was it?

A fine place for dinosaurs
The team's first task was to scour the beach for anything that might have been missed. The second task was to build up a picture of the general geological history of the region. The rocks are Cretaceous in age (see Timeline), and during the Lower Cretaceous the English Channel didn't exist. Sediment was deposited in a big swampy plain that covered much of southern England and northern France. The climate was warm and fairly tropical and it was a fine place for dinosaurs to live.

The team couldn't wait for the dinosaur to come to them so they had to go to it – even if this did mean enlisting the help of the Royal Engineers and doing some hard-access rope work to get to the crucial layer. The soldiers did a great job of rigging all the ropes and clearing access to the top of the cliff, but the weather was not good and the whole place rapidly became a mud bath.

Eventually, though, John Howell went over the edge in search of the elusive other half of Iggy's leg. He also surveyed the geology and measured the thickness and grain size of the sediments to determine their origin.

Dangling from a rope
While John was dangling from a rope, Dave Martill and Sarah Gabbott were also busy. Dave spent a little time looking at the remains and theorising about how the creature may have died before whizzing off to the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels and leaving the rest of the team to do what they could in the pouring rain. Lucy, the Big Monster Dig presenter, was given a lesson in the cleaning and preparation of fossils, and Sarah got to work with her team of searchers.

Given what he knew about the age of the rocks here, Dave had proposed that Iggy would probably be a member of the species Iguanodon atherfieldensis. He dismissed this idea as soon as he looked at it and compared it to other samples.

Dragged up the cliff
Next day, Sarah disappeared off to look for dinosaur trackways and John dragged poor Lucy up the cliff hoping that a second pair of eyes would help in the hunt. The weather was even worse and they spent several hours in the vertical mud bath with waves crashing below them. They turned up a few finds, though, and built up a fairly good story about how the bones got to their resting place in fast-flowing rivers.

Real developments
But the real developments were happening with Dave on the other side of the Channel.

Dave took Luke and his dinosaur remains to the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels. This fantastic museum contains the remains of a herd of the beasts that were extracted from a coal mine in 1878.

When Dave compared the remains they were clearly similar and he identified the Hastings Iguanodon as an Iguanodon bernissartensis. Yet the team had already dated the rocks at Hastings as 10 million years older than the oldest known I. bernissartensis. It would seem that Luke's discovery had pushed back the first appearance of I. bernissartensis by 10 million years!

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