On Finding a Dinosaur

They tell me I’m good at finding things. Word searches, jigsaw puzzles - they are unintentional brain-training to isolate patterns in chaos. When looking for fossils it takes a few attempts to recognise what you’re seeking. Then they say you ‘get your eye in’, or that you ‘have the eye’ for it. I tell them, I have two.

I found my first dinosaur on a glorious sunny day in the Inner Hebrides. I leapt from boulder to boulder across the foreshore of the Isle of Eigg, sprinting like a mountain goat back to my teammates. With each jump I looked down to place my feet securely on dry Jurassic sandstone, which Velcro-gripped the soles of my tattered hiking boots. The stench of sulphur was making me dizzy – a nearby pool choked in marine algae was festering in the hot May sunshine. To avoid it, I moved up shore. As I flew down from a high platform into a small shingle inlet, I saw a silhouette. Long, with a bulbous end. Pattern recognition. 

Shoreline on Isle of Eigg, with Isle of Rum in the distance.

Momentum carried me several steps further along the clattering shingle before I fully registered what I’d seen. I skidded and turned back. The shape was nestled in a boulder tucked below the sandstone outcrops. I crouched down and reached out, running my fingertips across the rough surface. The electric-thrill formed a Bifröst to the ancient past.

Most fossils are not worth collecting, and that’s where scientific knowledge comes in. It was my fourth palaeontological expedition with teams working in my home-country of Scotland. That day in 2017 I recognised the black splodge on the rocks of the foreshore as the remains of a limb bone. It looked like burnt charcoal, the surface cracked as though oven-baked. Where the bone was damaged I saw the tell-tale honeycomb of a structure once-living; the strut of biological architecture, nature’s engineering exposed. A portion of the long mid-shaft was gone, leaving a ghostly indent in the rock. A million frozen grains of sand encased one end of the bone, reluctant to let it go. This stone had carried it for 166 million years like a time-capsule. It was a dinosaur limb bone. I took photographs, then turned and sped South again. 

The Eigg dinosaur bone, or StEiggosaurus, moments after I found it.

When I found my team mates I told them I’d found something. What is it? they asked. I knew how disappointing it was when your ‘fossil’ find turned out to be a bit of driftwood, or a splatter of solidified tar, so I replied that I wasn’t sure, but maybe a limb bone... What kind of limb bone? They pressed. I sheepishly mentioned some possibilities, non-commitally mumbling dinosaur.

I led them back along the shore. When they caught up and saw it, their faces exploded like grin-grenades. They knelt and examined it, agreeing it was indeed a dinosaur limb bone. The first dinosaur I’d found, and the first dinosaur ever found on the Isle of Eigg.

We took photographs and notes, planning how it could be collected. In the following weeks a team arrived by boat to slice through the shore and cut out its dinosaur heart. This bone - which had drifted offshore in the Jurassic sea and come to rest in a sandy bed for a geological nap - now drifted once again, southwards to the lab of our colleague, Nigel Larkin. He carefully removed the surrounding sandstone, exposing the limb bone for us to study.

My artwork showing the kind of dinosaur the Eigg bone belonged to. It may have died crossed a river or delta, and been washed out to sea.

It was scarred by scavengers, and the ceaseless surf of Eigg had made off more than half the evidence, one granule at a time. To figure out to which animal it belonged, I worked with palaeontologists who specialise in different groups of extinct reptile: Femke Holwerda (sauropod-lover), Susannah Maidment (queen of stegosaurs), Davide Foffa (marine reptile chaser), Stephen Brusatte (theropod enthuser). With so little of the bone left to study, we turned to the tell-tale biological structure for further clues. Gregory Funston examined the microscopic structure of the bone, a codex for an animal’s growth. The evidence combined to tell us that this was the leg bone of a stegosaurian dinosaur, a plate-backed herbivore of the Jurassic. An early resident of Eigg, now at rest in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

By the time the whole team had assembled to look at the discovery on the shoreline that Summer’s day, I was already elsewhere. I’m restless as a wave, prefering movement. Hopefully life will always find me leaping along fermenting shorelines and shuffling below cliffs. I revel in zenful hours squinting at glinting surfaces, with salt spray scratching my lips and flaying my fingertips, sifting through ancient sands for fragments of Jurassic Scotland. 

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Panciroli, E., Funston, G. F., Holwerda, F., Maidment, S. C. R., Foffa, D., Larkin, N., Challands, T., dePolo, P., Goldberg, D., Humpage, M., Ross, D., Wilkinson, M., Brusatte, S. L. 2020. First dinosaur from the Isle of Eigg (Valtos Sandstone Formation, Middle Jurassic), Scotland. Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1-16.