Featured Stor y:
A dream come true.
Everything had so much colour; reds, greens
yellows; colours more beautiful than anything
Josh had ever seen before; and big. Everything
was bigger in size even than the giant sequoia
trees he had spent time trying to photograph
when he was on holiday last Summer. He
tried to run from fern to fern just to get the
measure of the enormity of it all when..
“Ouch, what did you do that for?” Josh cried
as his mum pulled back the duvet under
which he’d been snuggling.
“ Come on sleepyhead” she replied, forcing
him out of his reverie with a start “ Have
you forgotten? It’s time to get up. Remember
where we’re going today!”
Josh never forgot anything. Of course he
remembered where they were going. He was
going with his mum and dad on holiday to
visit his mum’s sister, Auntie Wendy, in Lyme
Regis.
“Boring with a capital YUCK” Josh chanted
as he went to the bathroom to brush his teeth
before getting dressed and taking his suitcase
downstairs to the car.
The last time they’d visited Auntie Wendy
Josh had only been four years old and he still
remembered the drive down from Newcastle
to the Dorset countryside and onto the coast.
However, at ten years old, he wasn’t the
slightest bit bothered about playing on the
beach.
Instead, he wanted to explore his collection
of dinosaurs and other creatures, the models
he’d been making and painting to put in
the Triassic landscape he had built in their
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loft. Taking him away from that project was
nothing short of torture especially as he had
almost finished the Postosuchus he’d been
making.
He knew that he’d promised mum and dad
that he would be positive about the visit; but
that didn’t mean he had to talk to anyone, did
it? Except about dinosaurs of course!
After a long and uneventful journey, Josh
and his mum and dad finally arrived at his
aunt’s small cottage on the coast to be greeted
by a tall, slender woman with greying hair
who looked at them sharply through a pair
of glasses perched on the end of her nose.
She had a look about her which brooked no
messing and which was rather similar to his
mum’s, her sister, when she was trying to find
out if he had done his homework. In her hand
she held a delicate looking brush.
Her smile transformed her face and Josh
thought it made her look more mischievous.
“Come in, come in, don’t stand on ceremony.
I’m just cleaning down some of the latest finds
and then I will make us a nice cup of tea.”
At Josh’s puzzled look, his mum and dad
exchanged a glance and then burst out
laughing.
“Oh Josh didn’t we tell you?” chuckled his
mum. Your Aunt Wendy is a palaeontologist.
The reason we’ve come to visit her now is
that she’s just uncovered one of the largest
sites of fossilised bones ever discovered in
this country and we thought you might like
to observe the dig. In fact, your dad and I are
planning to go away on our own for the week
and leave you and your aunt to talk about
dinosaurs.”
The first day down on the site was incredible.
By the time he’d got there, he’d already been
told by his aunt what to expect but nothing
had prepared him for what he saw. There were
holes all over the site, all with people working
away in them. To Josh it looked very much
like an archeological dig but his aunt had told
him that digging for fossils was very different;
he saw lots of people using small hammers
to extract what looked like plastercast shapes
from the rock. Then someone took the
fossil which had been dug out to a tent in
one corner of the site to clean it. Some of the
fossils found were tiny; some of them took
four or five people to move. Everyone worked
together and dropped their own tools when
someone found something.
Then a shout came from one of the far corners
of the site and everyone moved to watch. At
first Josh couldn’t see anything unusual except
for a bump in the rock. The group waited for
his aunt, who was the leader of the project to
proclaim that what they could all see seemed
to be the tail of a Pterosaur. A big cheer went
up from the group; this is what th