Go back through time in your time machine to discover the oldest dinosaur. You can print off a colour version of the broad game or a colouring in version to add your own funky colour. Cut it out carefully and stick together the edges so the pictures match up. Cut around the specimen cards and the time machine counters. You will need one dice to play the game. Up to four players.
To win you must collect all the samples, which means that you must land on the sample to pick it up. As you get near to the sample you have to decide to sit tight. If the number you throw is more than you need you can not move forward. Go past the sample without picking it up and you loose the game.
You will travel back in time 250 million years meeting animals and plants from pre-historic times.
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Lyme Regis Museum
The Dinosaur Time machine
Mary Anning back to the board game
Mary Anning was the most famous
fossil colloctor of all time, she found fantastic fossils from the Jurassic
Coast around Lyme Regis and Charmouth about 185 years ago. She found the
first Ichthyosaur fossil with her brother in 1812 at the age of 11. They
sold it for £24, a lot of money in those days. Mary Anning is an
inspiration to us all, you too can find fossils. Why not visit the Charmouth
Heritage Coast Centre to find out how to find fossils. You can find
out more about Mary Anning from the links under her picture.
Kent's
Cavern
BBC Weather, Climate
Change
The Ice Age back to the board game
The Ice Age lasted a long time, from about 2 million years ago and some people think it is still going on. Remember that during the Ice Age there were cold periods (Glacial) and warm periods (Inter glacial). It is thought that we are in an interglacial period now. Solid glaciers never came far enough south to cover the Jurassic Coast but they did come down as far as the North Devon Coast and Bristol Channel. In the cold periods the Jurassic Coast was very different, imagine frozen tundra like Northern Canada and Russia today. Teeth of a Woolly Mammoth have been found in river deposits along the coast. During warm periods animals which now are only found in Africa lived here, bones of hippopotamus and lions have been found in Britain. The most profound effect that the Ice age had on the Jurassic Coast was to lower and raise sea levels. During cold spells the sea level was very much lower and during warm spells even higher. After the last cold spell Chesil beach was formed as the sea level rose.
Continental
drift or more correctly Plate Tectonics
back to the board game
Geologists have proved that
the surface of the earth is moving. Like a giant cracked egg shell the
surface is made up of crustal plates which move very slowly. Riding upon
the plates are the continents and so through millions of years of geological
time the continents move around. Look at an atlas and see how South America
and Africa look like they once fitted together. In fact this was so about
225 million years ago. This explains why the rocks along the Jurassic
Coast vary from place to place. The rocks of East Devon formed 15 degrees
above the equator, where the deserts are today. This is a new idea in
geology, it was fully accepted by geologists only 35 years ago.
Related topic:
Earthquakes
Related topic: The ring of fire
Related topic: Volcanoes
Volcanoes back to the board game
Volcanoes are linked to Plate Tectonics, the movement of the plates causes eruptions to take place. Evidence of a volcanic eruption in the Jurassic is found in the Fuller's Earth clay. It is made of ash from a volcano. Where plates meet and one descends below the other, highly explosive volcanoes occur in mountain chains. Where two plates separate, moving away from each other, the gap is filled by lava coming from less explosive volcanoes, mostly under the sea.
Chalk back to the board game
Chalk is a pure white limestone rock found on the Jurassic Coast, it is made of millions and millions of microfossils. It formed in a vast warm sea surrounded by deserts in the Cretaceous period about 65-80 million years ago.
Dinosaurs die out, 65 million years ago back to the board game
Why did the most successful dynasty of animals, the dinosaurs die out 65 million years ago? It may have been an asteroid that hit the Earth or it may have been volcanic activity on a vast scale, no one knows for sure but scientists agree something big happened?
On the Jurassic Coast no evidence of dinosaurs becoming extinct has been found, yet? This is because at that time the area was under the sea. However many marine creatures also disappeared at the same time and marine fossils disappear from the rock record too.
Mammals back to the board game
At Durlston on the Jurassic Coast, fossils of small mammals that lived in the age of the dinosaurs have been found. They are early Cretaceous in age and are very very small. To find them you need a large amount of rock, sieved in the laboratory. Jaws and teeth have been found. From the same beds dinosaur footprints have been found.
The Fossil Forest and Dinosaur footprints. back to the board game
The Purbeck beds have a unique fossil forest and palaeo-soil (ancient soil) preserved within them. At Lulworth and Portland you can see the remains of this forest. Fossil wood and the algae that grew around the base of the trees is seen. In another layer hundreds of dinosaur footprints have been found.
Portland Limestone back to the board game
Portland Limestone is the most famous building stone in the world. It is used for magnificent buildings like St. Paul's Cathedral in London. It formed in a warm tropical sea near the end of the Jurassic period. The rock has no grain in it so it can be carved to form beautiful shapes for masonry.
Ammonites back to the board game
Ammonites were marine creatures related to Nautilus and Octopus. They had a coiled shell and there were many different species in the Jurassic and Cretaceous. At Charmouth and Lyme Regis they are common fossils and can be found by beach combing along the shore, between boulders.
Ichthyosaur
Ichthyosaur back to the board game
The Ichthyosaurs were the hunters of the Jurassic and Cretaceous seas. They looked and probibly lived like our modern Dolphins. There were many species ranging from small to very large, more like whales!
Scelidosaurus back to the board game
Scelidosaurus is a dinosaur, the earliest dinosaur to be found in the Jurassic rocks of the Jurassic Coast. It is found at Charmouth in one thin layer. Boulders fall to the beach and sometimes the fossil bones of Scelidosaurus are found in them. They are very rare and a mystery. Scelidosaurus was a land animal, so why have it's fossils been found at Charmouth? Charmouth was under the sea, so only marine fossil should be found?
Did it swim? Was it washed into the sea, maybe by a storm or a tidal wave? We just don't know. Scelidosaurus is the earliest known dinosaur on the Jurassic Coast but is it the oldest dinosaur?
Desert Sandstone back to the board game
Sand blown about by the wind forms dunes in the desert and we can see this in the cliffs of East Devon at Budleigh Salterton. Red fine grained sandstone from the Triassic Period.
back to the board game
You are know in the Triassic and these ceatures lived along rivers which ran through the deserts of East Devon 225 million years ago! See: Plate tectonics
Is this the Oldest Dinosaur? back to the board game
A dinosaur skeleton was found near Bristol which comes from the LateTriassic. Fossils have been found on the East Devon stretch of the World Heritage Site, but up until now non of these has been a dinosaur. The rocks on the east Devon coast are a little older, from the Middle and Early Triassic. They could however yield a fossil dinosaur in the future and who knows it may be you that finds it? Just because we have not yet found it does not mean that it is not there.