Sir David Attenborough hopes the discovery of a skull from a colossal sea monster will inspire children to be fossil hunters and scientists.
The 97-year-old veteran broadcaster will appear in a documentary about the pliosaur, a ferocious marine reptile that terrorised the oceans some 150 million years ago.
Attenborough and the Giant Sea Monster will air on New Year’s Day.
Sir David said: “There are still going to be 10-year-olds and 12-year-olds going around on bicycles hitting rocks with hammers. Kids that are being born today will still find that romantic – and not only kids.”
The national treasure added a little advice about fossil and dinosaur hunting, saying: “Put on glasses – it’s very dangerous!”
Sir David reminisced about the first ancient wonder he found as a boy in Leicester where he grew up.
He said: “There were these empty quarries…this great expanse of rock. All these boulders that nobody had ever hit! You’d think, ‘surely the next one! If I hit that one I’ll find something nobody has seen before!’”
His new film centres on a pliosaur skull, which alone is 6ft 5in long and weighs half a tonne. Excavated on Dorset’s Jurassic coast, it is one of the most complete specimens of its type ever found and is giving new insights into this ancient predator.
Sir David said: “This film is about the discovery of the skull of an extraordinary monster of the seas – one of the biggest predators the world has ever seen. The skull is the most important part of an animal, and what you can deduce from the skull is absolutely fascinating.
“Imagine you were from Mars, and when you landed on Earth all you could find were human skeletons but not a single one with a skull. You wouldn’t know anything about it.
“You wouldn’t know what it fed on, how it could move, you wouldn’t know what it could see – it would be useless. Well, that more or less was the situation we were in as far as this particular pliosaur was concerned.
“The skull had the potential to be the most informative find of any pliosaur ever made but initially it was only the end tip of this huge skull that was found. This is the story of how it was got out and how it was examined by scientists with the latest state-of-the-art equipment, how they were able to interpret it and tell us new things about pliosaurs, one of the biggest carnivorous creatures the world has ever seen.”
Sir David described the complexities faced by paleontologist Steve Etches and his team in extracting the fossil from a crumbling cliff face.
He said: “That’s a pretty heavy thing to handle. You have to get it out from halfway up the face of a tall cliff which itself is crumbling away and, if you drop it and break it, it is a major catastrophe. You will have lost a lot of information.
“So the problem we see in the first part of the programme was about how on earth do you go around getting this out? They only had a certain length of time because the storms of summer were on the way. You feel the tension as the people are trying to get it out and do it safely.”
● Attenborough and the Giant Sea Monster, BBC One and iPlayer on New Year’s Day from 8pm.
