Past master
Pub landlord and palaeontologist extraordinaire Charlie Newman helps Harry Mount find ancient wildlife on the Jurassic Coast
There we were, three novice fossil-hunters, inching our way along the edge of the Isle of Purbeck, the sea lashing our feet, the wind and stair-rod rain whipping our faces.
That’s when our guide – Charlie Newman, pub landlord, cider-maker, museum curator and palaeontologist – suddenly spotted a tiny, white curve, the size of a toenail, in a huge, grey boulder at our feet.
Within seconds, he’d whipped out his chisel and hammer, and had cut a square foot of stone out of the boulder. That tiny, white toenail was, in fact, a fossilised vertebra of an ichthyosaur.
For four hours, Charlie led us along the Dorset coast, spotting treasures we never would have seen without him. Fish, ammonites, crocodiles, turtles, reptiles, ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs all swam along these shores before they were fossilised after death hundreds of millions of years ago.
Charlie doesn’t just track down ancient wildlife. He is so prominent in world palaeontology that our earliest known ancestor was named after him. In 2017, a small, nocturnal mammal, which lived 145 million years ago, was called Durlstotherim newmani by palaeontologists from the University of Portsmouth.
Its remains had been recently discovered on the Durlston cliffs near Swanage. The rat-like creature is the earliest known animal in a line leading down to humans on one branch; to blue whales and pigmy shrews on another.
Charlie helped the Portsmouth scientists collect the new specimens, identified from several fossilised teeth.
‘The specimen is named after Charlie Newman because he is a keen amateur palaeontologist and has a small museum in his pub,’ says Dr Steve Sweetman, a research fellow at Portsmouth who identified the teeth. ‘He helped us collect samples and was otherwise very helpful and hospitable.’
Back on the Isle of Purbeck, Charlie, with his Border collie at his side, raced across the shingle and scaled the lower heights of the cliff behind us, identifying tiny fragments of fossilised bone in the cliff face. On other days, he brings a telescopic device to grasp out-of-reach finds.
At one moment, Charlie dropped to his knees and started pouring what looked like common-or-garden sand into a plastic bottle.
This was so-called ‘pyritised sand’ – full of tiny sharks’ teeth and ostracods (minute shrimps). Charlie took back these finds to examine them under the microscope in the laboratory in his nearby home, where he lives with his wife, actress Cath Bradshaw.
Pyritisation is the process in which sea creatures have their organic matter replaced by pyrite – iron disulphide, also known as fool’s gold. There’s a lot of orange-brown iron in the stone round here – at one point, Charlie passed me a small boulder, and my hand sank with the surprising weight of the metal in it.
These minuscule, pyritised finds were way beyond the fossil-spotting ability of us novices. After a few hours, though,
even we new boys had tuned our eyes in, scanning the pebbles and boulders at our feet, and spotting ammonites – the elegant, spiral molluscs that swam here 140 million years ago.
We’d come at the right time of year – just after a spring tide and heavy winter storms had given the stretch of coast a ‘good old tidy-up’, said Charlie. Three feet of shingle had been cleared away from one flat platform of fossilstudded stone. Charlie immediately spotted a long, straight fossil embedded in the rock – a wing bone of a pterosaur with a 16ft wingspan.
‘That only gets cleared twice a year,’ said Charlie of the platform.
The tide had also swept away the shingle above my prize find of the day: a 140-million-year-old ammonite in mint condition, complete with a flat ledge – its very own built-in stand! – beneath its swirling, fossilised circles.
Gently cradling the new discovery in my arms, I showed it off, like a newborn baby, to Charlie. A staggering find? Worth millions?
‘Not bad,’ said Charlie in his gentle, low-key voice, ‘You could make a clock out of that one.’
Walking back to Charlie’s pub, the
‘Crocodiles, turtles, ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs all swam along these shores’
Square and Compass, ammonite under my arm, I began to see why my find was so unexciting. In a side room of the 18th-century stone pub, yards from the serving hatch where you can buy Charlie’s homemade cider, you’ll find his fossil museum – crammed with A-list treasures.
Now 52, Charlie has been scanning these coasts since he was a boy, walking in the footsteps of his father, Raymond Newman – also the landlord of the Square and a fossil-hunter. The Newmans have been landlords of the pub since 1907, when Charlie’s great-grandfather, also Charles Newman,
took it over. Charlie has often gone fossil-hunting with Steve Etches – who, over the past 30 years, has discovered, collected and researched more than 2,000 specimens. The pick of their finds are on show nearby in the Etches Collection, a £5 million building that opened in 2016.
Charlie’s father began collecting birds’ eggs as a boy before moving on to fossils in the 1950s. The bones he found in the Wealden deposits in Swanage Bay were so important that a Natural History Museum palaeontologist catalogued them in the 1960s.
The pub museum, opened in 1998, has fossils and Jurassic and Cretaceous molluscs, all found by Charlie and his father, together with donations from local enthusiasts. Pride of place goes to a copy of a complete ichthyosaur Charlie plucked from the cliffs with Steve Etches. The original is in the Etches Collection.
The cabinets also display Charlie’s finds from more recent history: from Mesolithic and Neolithic flint tools, to pre-roman and Roman coinage and jewellery, to 18th-century shipwreck finds, including cannonballs and Spanish silver coins overprinted with the image of George III.
Charlie is such a history buff that, in 2015, he even built ‘Woodhenge’, a 12ft-high version of Stonehenge, in the field next to the pub, with 35 tonnes of timber. Purbeck District Council tried to have it torn down, but it’s so popular that it has survived.
This part of Britain is perfect for fossils. The Jurassic Coast – stretching for 95 miles from Exmouth, Devon, in the west, to Studland Bay, Dorset, in the east – exposes 185 million years’ worth of the earth’s history, through the Triassic (250 million to 200 million years ago), Jurassic (200 million to 145 million years ago) and Cretaceous (145 million to 66 million years ago) periods.
The black, grey and yellow cliffs – the backdrop to our walk – are a mammoth slice through hundreds of millions of years of history. There are all sorts of stones here, too: Kimmeridge Clay, Portland and Purbeck stone, chalk, greensand and the Wealden beds.
Those cliffs are regularly battered by the elements. That means it’s highly dangerous work without a guide. When we got too close to the cliff face, Charlie warned us to move away. Every half hour or so, there was a great rumbling from above and a car boot load of rocks came rolling down the cliff, dislodged by the recent storms.
By the time we’d got to our last bay, I was looking forward to a pint of Charlie’s cider. Charlie, though, had spotted a new rockfall, displaced by the storm, that had tumbled into the dunes. As dusk fell, he was still digging in the sand, energy undimmed.
Because the cliffs are forever being stripped and renewed, the work of the King of the Fossil-hunters is never done.
The Square and Compass, Worth Matravers, Dorset, and its fossil museum are open seven days a week, noon-11pm. The Etches Collection, Kimmeridge, Dorset, is open every day, 10am-5pm; www.theetchescollection.org