Christian Little

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 to find 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 from around 18 – 35 minutes.It is the perfect way to begin a family holiday, and actually feels like you are travelling far because of the need to catch the ferry, an adventure for the kids.

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 a plant-eater called Iguanodon, which stood about five metres tall. As many as three hundred fossilised skeletons of these giants have been discovered on the Island to date.

The island has yielded a major quantitiy of dinosaur discoveries in 11 miles of sandstone and clay in the Sandown region, known amonst geologist as the Wealdon outcrop, and home to Europe’s most rich seam of dinosaur remains.Over 15 types of dinosaur are known to have inhabited the Island and a new species is discovered every three years. One of the most recent Isle of Wight dinosaur discoveries was made 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 around 15 ft (4.5 m) long that lived during the middle Cretaceous period about 125 million years ago.That pre-dates T. Rex by nearly 80 million years. It doesn’t surprise me that a museum dedicated to the dinosaur experience now exists on the island. You can visit Dinosaur Isle, 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’.