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Home » Physical Environment/Landscape » Natural history » Dinosaurs

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  • This set of dinosaur footprints was found on the green in front of the church at Newton Nottage, near Porthcawl, in 1878. The rock in which they are impressed is of Upper Triassic age (about 225 million years old) but exactly where it came from is unknown.
Fossil: Anchisauripus thomasi: Large dinosaur footprints - Anchisauripus
  • This dinosaur was found in rocks of Upper Cretaceous age from the Black Hills of South Dakota, USA and was purchased by the National Museum of Wales in 1986. It belongs to a group of dinosaurs called Hadrosaurs, which are more popularly known as duck-billed dinosaurs due to the shape of the snout. It was once thought that such dinosaurs fed on soft, aquatic plants but, from the study of their teeth and jaws, we now know that they fed on the tough branches and foliage of conifers. The banks of teeth in the lower and upper jaws (up to around 1000 teeth in around 60 rows) moved over each other in a shearing action, which both sliced the tough food up and kept the teeth sharp.
Fossil: Edmontosaurus annectens - a plant-eating dinosaur [image 1 of 3]
  • Ichthyosaurs are extinct, dolphin-shaped, marine reptiles which first evolved in the Upper Triassic, about 225 million years ago, and died out at the end of the Cretaceous Period, about 65 million years ago. Their bones and skeletons are quite common fossils in the Upper Triassic and Lower Jurassic rocks of the Vale of Glamorgan, especially those around Lavernock Point, near Penarth. This small, partial skeleton was in the collections of the Old Cardiff Municipal Museum and may have been originally given to the Cardiff Philosophical Institution by William Daniel Conybeare, who was Dean of Llandaff from 1845 to 1857. Conybeare, with his colleague, Henry Thomas de la Beche, were the first to properly scientifically describe ichthyosaurs and their reptilian cousin, the plesiosaur. Correspondence between these two early geologists concerning the description of these reptiles is to be found amongst the de la Beche archive that is housed in the Geology Department of the National Museum of Wales.
Fossil: Conybeare's Ichthyosaur
  • This 1830 watercolour by the geologist Henry Thomas de la Beche was the first to portray a fossil environment in its entirety, and to show the interactions of the various elements of the fossil fauna and flora, and in particular the large marine reptiles of the early Jurassic Period. Lithographs of this image were produced and sold to raise funds to ease the poverty of the famous fossil collector Mary Anning who lived in Lyme Regis.
'Duria Antiquior - a more ancient Dorsetshire' by Henry Thomas de la Beche, 1830 (watercolour)
  • Plaster-cast of dinosaur footprints, discovered in the parish of Newton Nottage in 1878, by Mr. T. H. Thomas. These footprints resemble those of a Brontozoum described by Htichcock and Deane in Abbottsville, Massachusetts, and Smith's Ferry, Connecticut. This species is named 'Brontozoum Thomasi' after its finder, but seems identical to the American species B.Validum. This is the only stone on which the impressions of the bird-footed reptiles of the Triassic Age that has been discovered on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. The stone slab on which the footprints were discovered was presented by its owner, Colonel Picton Turbervill, to the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.
Plaster cast of dinosaur footprints, found in the parish of Newton & Nottage, Porthcawl, 1878
Fossil: Edmontosaurus annectens - a plant-eating dinosaur [image 2 of 3]