Dinosaurland Fossil Museum (aka Dinosaurland) is a privately owned fossil museum in Lyme Regis, on the Jurassic Coast in Dorset, England.[2][3][4] The museum is located in a historic Grade I listed former congregational church building.
Museum
The museum, opened in 1989, is owned and run by Steve Davies, a former chief palaeontologist for BP.[5][6] It contains a collection of local marine fossils from the Jurassic period. The museum organizes guided fossil hunting walks.[7] There is a museum shop that sells fossils and minerals.[4][8]
The fossil collection is housed on the ground floor.[9] As well as local Jurassic fossils, there are dinosaurs from China. There are also modern shells and skeletons on display. The museum has a small collection of dinosaur fossils on show (such as a large dinosaur coprolite, a Megalosaurus skeleton and a Chinese dinosaur, of unknown genus).
Congregational Church
The museum is located on Coombe Street in a 250-year-old Grade I listed building that used to be a congregational church.[1] The church was built between 1750 and 1755 by John Whitty. It was where Mary Anning (1799–1847), an early fossil hunter, was baptised and later attended for worship.[10]
The two storey building has a hipped roof and rusticatedquoins. The round-headed doorway has Doricpilasters on either side. There is a 19th-century addition to the left hand end of the building.[11]
^Oliver Berry and Belinda Dixon, Devon, Cornwall & Southwest England, Lonely Planet, 2008. Page 161. ISBN 978-1-74104-873-5.
^ a bThomas A. Hose, Geotourism: Appreciating the deep time of landscapes. In Marina Novelli (editor), Niche tourism: contemporary issues, trends and cases, Butterworth-Heinemann, 2005. ISBN 978-0-7506-6133-1.
