A fossilized dinosaur that is 200 million years old has been discovered and put on display at a museum, by a rescue dog.

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'Raffle stumbled across the fossilised skeleton of a Jurassic plesiosaur while on a walk with owner Tracey Barclay and some friends at Lyme Regis, Dorset, in 2007'

'I noticed he was sat on top of an exposed vertebrae bone and it turned out to be a 200 million-year-old dinosaur fossil.'

Permission was granted to dig it up a year later and it has taken professionals 15 years of meticulous and complex preparation to get the skeleton ready for display.

It is now on public display at the Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre near Lyme Regis, the town renowned for the pioneering palaentologist Mary Anning.

The plesiosaur was a sea-dwelling reptile that existed during the Jurassic period off what is now Dorset, and had powerful paddle-like limbs for swimming.

Some of the earliest well-preserved specimens of these creatures have been discovered in Dorset.

The very first complete plesiosaur was discovered at Lyme Regis by Mary Anning in 1824.



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The rare skeleton found by Raffle had been safeguarded in the well-known ammonite pavement at Monmouth Beach for millions of years.



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Tracey and her partner Chris Moore kept an eye on the fossil for 12 months before getting permission from Natural England to extract it.

‘He got up and laid down again and I saw this vertebrae sticking out of the cliff. I had a look at it and thought it was strange - it was quite big.’

The fossil has now gone on public display at the Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre near Lyme Regis.

The plesiosaur had been preserved within the famous ammonite pavement at Monmouth Beach over millions of years and experts have spent the last 15 years carefully preparing it for display.

It is one of just a few 3D Lower Jurassic plesiosaurs in the world and is 70 per cent complete, with missing bones cast and modelled from the other existing bones.



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