Paleontologist Steve Davies owns Dinosaurland, a fossil museum in Lyme Regis which houses 26,000 specimens – and is growing all the time
Steve Davies’ affinity for the Jurassic Coast dates back to his school days, when he visited Lyme Regis on a school trip. “My geology teacher took us down to the beach and I found a fossil – a golden ammonite, around two inches across. There it was, waiting for me – early Jurassic, 200 million years old. It was a life-changing moment,” he says.
That first discovery ignited a passion that still burns brightly today. Now, Steve owns Lyme Regis’ independent fossil museum, Dinosaurland. It’s a traditional museum with 26,000 specimens on display, housed in the town’s former Congregationalist Church where Mary Anning, the so-called Mother of Paleontology, was baptised and worshipped for most of her life.
Before he opened the museum 29 years ago, Steve worked as a chief paleontologist in the oil industry, working with microscopic fossils. “It was a wonderful career for a young man, and very exciting,” he says. “I was travelling to environments that are incredibly hostile and difficult to get to, such as Arctic Alaska or the Gobi Desert.”
Nevertheless, Lyme continued to exert its pull. Steve says that, after corporate restructuring, “I resigned in a fit of pique and came here to lick my wounds.
“Then the building that my museum is housed came on the market, and I thought I could do something with it. At first, I had an empty, dilapidated building and nothing to put in it. I had a lot of skills in management and writing, but I had to quickly learn things like carpentry so I could build the cabinets.” He also set about acquiring skills in model-making, which resulted in the extremely convincing dinosaurs on the museum’s upper floor.
Dinosaurland is charmingly unique – with awe-inspiring specimens including enormous ammonites, ichthyosaurs and an enormous lump of dinosaur dung. Throughout, there’s a real sense of the man behind it all and his passion for the subject.
Steve says the museum will never stop growing, and he spends the winter months, when the museum is closed, hunting for fossils on local beaches. “Everything in the museum is important to me. I have some ichthyosaurs which are quite rare and precious, but to me, there’s no difference between those and the humblest of the little belemnites. I can tell you something personal about every single one of those things.
“Running the museum is a huge indulgence for me. If I won the lottery and could do whatever I wanted with my life, this is it – I’m doing it right now.”
