No wonder Bill Verkaik loves fossils. They are the things that enabled him to quit the oil industry and the infuriating London bustle and re-locate to the joys of Jurassic Dorset.

But his passion for palaeontology started many years before that, as a child growing up in Folkestone.

“It’s quite famous for fossils, you can find a lot of fossilised sea-urchins, and one day I pointed out this strange-looking, segmented thing in a stream,” he says. “I discovered it was a fossil and became absolutely fascinated by them.”

He believes there are two reasons why we love these ancient rocks and the creatures preserved in them.

“Firstly you’re the first person to see it since it died,” he says. “If you go to somewhere like Lyme or Charmouth you’re looking at around 200 million years of history.”

The second reason he loves fossils is because finding them is like discovering hidden treasure.

“It’s that feeling of something special, dinosaurs were these giant creatures that roamed the earth at that time and fossils are our direct connection to them,” he says.

Noticing how much his own children adored fossil-hunting lead to his idea for his business, Junior Geo, which leads educational fossil-hunting trips and sells funky merchandise, like a junior fossil-hunting kit complete with hammer, satchel and eye-protection.

“It’s fascinating for kids, they get excited about the smallest little fragment,” he says and indeed, most of the fossils he finds on the organised trips ‘get passed back along the line’ to the children, although he does have a large personal collection.

Like the legendary Lyme fossil-huntress, Mary Anning he has found ichthyosaur bones but unlike her, never a whole creature. “I think you’d have to be on the beach each day to get a really big find,” he says, although he has developed an expert eye for rocks which might contain them.

The thing he’d most like to discover, of course, is a pliosaur, the fearsome, giant sea-monster that was last seen killing everything in its path on David Attenborough’s Walking With Dinosaurs.

“There’s a pliosaur head in the Dorchester museum and that is over two metres long,” he says. “Imagine finding the whole thing!”

Junior Geo has done the next best thing. They have produced a replica pliosaur tooth, four inches long and with ridges that would have helped grasp the unfortunate prey.

They sell a number of replica fossils, through Dorset Tourism offices and at the Natural History Museum in London.

“Fossils are becoming quite rare because so many people are looking for them,” he says. “This way, if you don’t find one, or want to see exactly what something looked like, you can buy a good-quality copy.”

And as he points out, if you’ve been on a fossil hunt at least you’ll have had a great day in the fresh air.

  • juniorgeo.co.uk