fossils

Roger Downie, Froglife and University of Glasgow

The Jurassic Coast of Dorset and east Devon is internationally known: a UNESCO World Heritage Site, designated for its wealth of fossil-rich rocks. Less well known is that the Isle of Skye is also a key site for fossils.

Although local people had long known about the occasional occurrence of what looked like giant footprints on the shores of the Isle of Skye, scientists had not seen good evidence of dinosaur remains on the island, despite the sedimentary rocks being of the right sort of age, until the 1970s.

Michael Waldman, who died this year, but then a geology teacher, was leading a school field trip and discovered what turned out to be a rich fossil site at the village of Elgol. Over the years, Jurassic mammals, fish, amphibians and reptiles have been found at the site including one named after Waldman as Eileanchelys waldmani  (Waldman’s island turtle). In the Jurassic period, 199-145 million years ago, the land that became Skye was part of the vast continent of Pangaea and located south of the Equator with a climate similar to modern Florida. The Jurassic was the time when dinosaurs were the dominant land animals.

On Skye, intense investigation followed the discovery of a massive sauropod dinosaur femur in 1994, and new discoveries are now made most years. Dinosaur footprints have been discovered at several beaches: An Corran, Score Bay, Brothers’ Point and Duntulm. These are so accessible that commercial guided tours are advertised for visitors to see them. White & Ross (2020) have reviewed the history of these discoveries.

The Jurassic fossils found on Skye are not only of dinosaurs. They include small mammals, turtles, marine invertebrates, lizards and amphibians. The early scientific work was led by Dr Neil Clark of Glasgow University’s Hunterian Museum, latterly joined by Professor Steve Brusatte and colleagues, University of Edinburgh. Examples of recent discoveries include:

2016: A tiny lizard, 6 cm long, named Bellairsia gracilis after the eminent British herpetologist Angus Bellairs.

2017: a remarkably well-preserved large pterosaur

2018: a mouse-like rodent

2020: new deltapodus at Brothers’ Point (a deltapodus is the fossilised footprint of a stegosaur).

This year, two major scientific papers have been published based on fossil reptile discoveries on Skye. First, Blakesley et al.(2025) have reported on an extensive set of dinosaur trackways from Prince Charles’s Point (named after the location where Bonnie Prince Charlie is thought to have escaped capture following his defeat at Culloden in 1746) on the northwest coast of the Trotternish peninsula.

Fieldwork at the site, only possible at low tide, extended over several seasons, 2019-24. The team recorded 131 dinosaur trackways (each having at least three tracks), 65 of them being made by bipedal three-toed carnivorous theropods, most likely Megalosauripus, and 58 by quadrupedal herbivorous sauropods, likely Breviparopus (with a few of the trackways unidentifiable). The site had been studied in the 1980s, but the researcher involved had concluded that the marks he observed in the rocks were from ancient fish resting burrows.

The present authors have undertaken extremely detailed measurements and photographic recording of the depressions to arrive at a very different conclusion. The evidence of different directions of movement indicates a population milling around at the shallowly submerged margin of a lagoon. The high proportion of carnivores is a surprising result from the study. Trackways like these can rarely be preserved, as they will eventually be eroded away, so it is important that scientists record them thoroughly while it remains possible.

Second, Benson et al.(2025), a multinational team from the USA, UK and France, have described Breugnathair elgolensis (Breugnathair is derived from Gaelic, meaning ‘false snake’; and elgolensis is from Elgol, the location on Skye first worked on by Waldman). The specimen (NMS G. 2023.7.1) was discovered in March 2015 at the Elgol Coast Site of Special Scientific Interest, and extracted as a block of limestone 22x18x15 cm. The block was submitted to a wide range of modern imaging techniques (CT scanning; X-ray tomography), whole and in parts, and some of the fossil bones were sectioned. Their highly technical results have been put into context along with another paper by Marke et al. (2025) by Zaher (2025).

Zaher frames his commentary using Antoine de Saint Exupery’s story from The Little Prince: his childish drawing was interpreted by adults as a hat, while he himself claimed that it showed a boa constrictor that had swallowed an elephant! Message: things are not always what they seem, and snakes have remarkable ability to consume whole prey much larger than their heads. This ability derives from several evolutionary innovations, mainly the mobility of the head skeleton, and  of sharp-pointed curved teeth. Marke et al.’s results push the divergence of squamates (snakes and lizards, now more than 12,000 species) from Rhynchocephalians (now only one species, New Zealand’s tuatara) further back than previously thought, to the early middle Triassic, 247-241 million years ago.

Benson et al. provide the most complete description so far of a parviraptorid, from the mid Jurassic, 167 million years ago: previous descriptions of incomplete specimens of this enigmatic group, which existed for 20 million years from the mid Jurassic to early Cretaceous, have revealed such a mix of characters that investigators concluded that the fossils contained more than one species. However, Benson’s results show these characters belong to a single species. Their analysis does not resolve the issue of whether parviraptorids are early snakes, early lizards or a side-line with no long-term outcome, hence their generic name meaning ‘false snake’. Zaher concludes: ‘the data reframe the debate and highlight the limitations of drawing far-reaching conclusions from fragmentary material…evidence suggests that the key snake characters, such as hallmark dental features, might have evolved multiple times, or might have been more widespread among early squamates than was previously thought’.

One thing is clear from all this: the Isle of Skye is likely to be a fruitful site for exploring reptile evolution for some time to come. However, if you are tempted to rush off to Skye, please read the JNCC’s (1997) Fossil Collecting Policy Statement first, detailing permissions needed and best practice guidelines.

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