The oldest jigsaw in the world
Fossil hunter rebuilds amazing find after he smashes it into 200 bits
FOR fossil hunter Jonathan Bow, it was the discovery of a lifetime: a 200million-year-old skeleton almost immaculately preserved in a rock on the beach.
Armed with a hammer, the 36-yearold set about trying to chip away at the slab – when crack! – the limestone splintered and his extraordinary find shattered into 200 pieces.
The amateur palaeontologist spent the next two years sticking the fragments back together with super glue. Now, finally, he has unveiled the completed jurassic jigsaw, which is the largest fossil ever found in Wales.
Experts believe it to be a subspecies of the plesiosaur, a marine reptile. Mr Bow’s discovery includes the lower jaw, inch-long teeth and some of the pelvis and flippers.
He came across the specimen during a stroll along a beach near Cardiff in November 2014, after storms had exposed new rocks to investigate.
Mr Bow said: ‘The whole block was too heavy to move and so I tried to find the weak spot between the shale layer and the limestone layer and then used my hammer to try to prise the shale away from the limestone. Unfortunately this shale is very sticky and
‘Seven bags of rock and bone’
so the fossil ended up in about 200 pieces. We had seven carrier bags full of bits of bone and rock which we hauled off the beach.’
Luckily Mr Bow, a computer programmer from Porthcawl, had the foresight to photograph the fossil before it broke up to aid him when piecing it back together.
He was able to expose more of the creature’s bones in the rock using airpowered needles, similar to a dentist’s drill, to delicately break away the surrounding limestone. But he relied on bog-standard super glue to stick the fragments together. He added: ‘Some days I would spend two or three hours just to find one adjoining piece.’
Mr Bow’s fossil is thought to be an example of an avalonnectes from the early Jurassic period, when the UK was just a collection of tropical islands. The only other specimen said to be from the UK is believed to have been found in Somerset.
Plesiosaurs lived off fish and could grow to be over six feet long. It was once claimed that the Loch Ness monster was an example of the species.
Mr Bow now hopes to find the rest of the creature’s skeleton elsewhere on the beach. It is one of the jewels in his collection, which has been growing since he was a young boy.
He said: ‘I find, collect, and prepare all the fossils myself and then inform my academic contacts in palaeontology about some of the more important items. I’ve also donated items to Cardiff Museum.’
‘My favourite find is just a single small bone I found at Penarth a few years ago, which is a finger bone from a meat- eating dino- saur called megalosaurus, an earlier relation of a T-Rex.’ Among Mr Bow’s other discoveries is a fossil which could be a micro- sized crocodile, currently in the National Museum of Wales.