Mark Kemp, of Hull, known as 'The Yorkshire Fossil Hunter' is an expert in finding, collecting and preparing fossils for the last 10 years. He's also offers guided walks, along the Yorkshire coast and owns a large assortment of fossil which he found and prepared during his many travels. Just before Christmas 2023 Mark, was out fossil hunter along the Yorkshire Coastline near Whitby North Yorkshire, where he discovered a large bone assembly from a Jurassic Crocodile fossil which lived on earth over 180-million-years ago. The fossil which has taken over 40 hours to prepare shows vertebrae, ribs, legs bones, parts of the jaw bone and scutes.
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00:00 Hello my name is Mark Kemp I'm the Yorkshire Fossil Hunter. So this is a crocodile burn block which I found.
00:07 I was out collecting Whitby on the Yorkshire coast and I was on my way back to the van and I stumbled across this quite large boulder.
00:15 I had a look on the edges and I could see a load of burn and instantly I knew it was crocodile.
00:19 So I brought it home to my workshop and I spent a good 30-40 hours cleaning it with pneumatic tools and it revealed some lovely lovely crocodile burns.
00:28 We've got a huge rib here, we've got some leg burns, we've got a lovely vertebrae and all of these little plates what you can see with the holes in, these are scopes.
00:39 They're like modern day armour plates on what you see on crocodiles. So all together it's a really really nice assembly of Jurassic Age crocodile burns.
00:47 Roughly around 180-190 million years old. I was out collecting with a friend, I was getting loads of badminton ice and I'm on the way back I had a really heavy bag and I walked between two big boulders that I hadn't seen before.
01:00 And this was just stuck in between the two big boulders. So I had to empty my bag to fit this one in because as you can imagine it weighs a lot.
01:09 On the edge I could see a load of burn sticking out and straight away it stood out to me as a crocodile burn. So as you can imagine I was doing cartwheels on the beach.
01:17 So crocodile burn does get discovered but it is quite rare. The best example is in the Whitby Museum. They've got a pretty much complete crocodile in there.
01:25 But my scopes are a little bit bigger than their scopes. Sorry museum but mine's a bigger specimen than yours.
01:32 Especially box this size with crocodile in. Crocodile on the Yorkshire coast is quite rare so to get an assembly like this is quite incredible really.
01:40 Right so what's really really special about this item is just the assembly. The way it looks aesthetically is so pleasing on the eye.
01:48 We've got a complete rib here. So this is really really rare to get a complete rib from a crocodile.
01:54 The leg burns are really really well preserved. The vertebrae is by far one of the nicest vertebrae's I've ever seen.
02:02 And then again these scopes, they're really really large for crocodile scopes on the Yorkshire coast.
02:08 And they're really really well preserved. You can see all of the beautiful bone structure in between all the little scope holes.
02:15 So yeah it's just a really nice aesthetic piece.
02:19 So this is going in the Mark Kent collection for the foreseeable future.
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