An incredible 200 million years dinosaur fossil found by a pet dog on a beach was finally exhibited 16 years later.
Rescue dog Raffle stumbled upon the fossilized skeleton of a Jurassic plesiosaur during a walk with owner Tracey Barclay at Lyme Regis, Dorset, in 2007.
The nine-year-old dog rested briefly on top of the creature’s exposed vertebra which was later spotted by Tracey, an amateur fossil hunter.
Permission to unearth it was granted a year later, and it has taken experts 15 years of painstaking and intricate preparation to get the skeleton ready for display.
It is now on public display at the Charmouth Heritage Coast Center near Lyme Regis, the seaside town made famous by pioneering paleontologist Mary Anning.
Plesiosaurs were long-necked marine reptiles that had powerful paddle-like limbs that allowed them to swim in water.
Some of the world’s earliest well-preserved specimens have been discovered in Dorset. The first complete plesiosaur was found at Lyme Regis by Mary Anning in 1824.
The rare skeleton found by Raffle had been preserved within the famous ammonite pavement at Monmouth Beach for millions of years.
Tracey and her partner Chris Moore, who runs a fossil preparation business, monitored it for 12 months, and natural erosion revealed more vertebrae.
They then obtained permission from Natural England to extract it.
The fossil went through the lengthy acid washing process and the bones mapped, restored, and prepared for mounting.
The plesiosaur, which is 10 feet 6 inches long, is 70 percent complete, with missing bones cast and modeled after the other existing bones.
It is one of the world’s few 3D Lower Jurassic plesiosaurs.
“I went for a walk with my partner and some friends. I stood on the sidewalk while everyone was walking and Raffle was sitting across from me,” said Tracey, 59.
‘When he got up, he started scratching the floor. I know of fossils and I could see that they were some vertebrae that she had found.
“It’s quite common to find only a few vertebrae, so I scratched a little to see if there were more.”
Tracey found a specific paddle bone for a plesiosaur, which made her hope there were more. The main problem was in the ammonite pavement, which is a Site of Special Scientific Interest.
Chris came back and confirmed it was a plesiosaur, then we had to watch it for a while to make sure there were more. We had to do the extraction in two tides and then little by little we have been working on it,’ he said.
The couple had to send it to Yorkshire for acid preparation, which is time consuming.
‘It’s been a real team effort, a lot of people have been involved. It’s quite an exciting thing to finally see it on display, it looks amazing.
The plesiosaur, a marine reptile that thrived in the Jurassic seas off what is now Dorset, has been affectionately named Raffle after its canine forager who died in 2013.
“It seems correct to call it after Raffle, after all, it was his find.”
“There are only a handful of these 3D specimens in the world, so this was a very rare find,” said Grant Field of the heritage center.
“It’s the kind of thing you’d get in London or New York natural history museums, so staying local amongst other great local specimens shows just how special the Lyme Regis and Charmouth fossils really are.”
‘Our center is free to enter so everyone can come and see Raffle the plesiosaur.’
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