This summer holiday, if you want to entertain and educate the kids you don’t have to go too far. Children of all ages have a fascination with dinosaurs and fossils and one of the best places to go if you want to combine a perfect family holiday with the thrills of pre-history is the Isle of Wight. A combination of location and geology has made it the perfect place for fossils! In fact, the Isle of Wight is one of the richest locations for dinosaur finds in the whole of Europe as well as being a convenient and appealing family holiday destination.
Getting there couldn’t be easier as the Isle of Wight ferry operates between the mainland and the island every day of the year on three routes across the Solent.Routes operate from Portsmouth to Fishbourne, Lymington to Yarmouth or Portsmouth to Ryde with crossings taking around 18 – 35 minutes.It’s a perfect way to start a vacation, and by catching the ferry the kids feel like they are getting an extra adventure along the way.
The Isle of Wight is blessed with warmer than average climate today, but 120 million years ago the Isle of Wight was a subtropical paradise teeming with land and marine life. Situated close to the equator, sandwiched between what is now Cornwall and Belgium, the Island was home to many prehistoric creatures.The commonest of all these prehistoric Island inhabitants was Iguanodon, which stood about five metres tall.As many as three hundred fossilised skeletons of these beasts have been discovered on the Island to date.
The Isle of Wight has proved to be a major source of dinosaur finds and an 11 mile stretch of sandstone and clay in the Sandown area, known to geologists as the Wealdon outcrop, is Europe’s most prolific reservoir of dinosaur fossils.Over 15 types of dinosaur are known to have roamed the Island and a new species is discovered on average every three years. One of the most recent Isle of Wight dinosaur discoveries was unearthed by local dino hunter Gavin Leng in 1997. Called Eotyrannus lengi, it’s an early relative of Tyrannosaurus Rex and was a meat-eating dinosaur about 15 ft (4.5 m) long that lived during the middle Cretaceous period about 125 million years ago. That pre-dates Tyrannosaurus Rex by nearly 80 million years. Because of the rich dinosaur heritage on the Island, it is perhaps not surprising that there should be a dedicated place to see these specimens. You can visit Dinosaur Isle of Wight at any time of the year for a fascinating experience!
Other species of dinosaur available to be seen, preferring the summer months to emerge, is the legendary ‘rock star’.
