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Natural History: 7 year old boy from Dorset finds rare tooth from ancient animal that lived 55 million years ago
29 July 2024
By Sarah Hagen
By Sarah Hagen
The rare Prototomus tooth © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
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7 year old James with his find. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
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A seven-year-old boy from Dorset has found a rare tooth from an ancient animal called a Protomus, which lived more than 55 millions years ago.
As part of a regular offering at the annual Lyme Regis Fossil Festival, visitors to NHM’s stand were given the chance to sift through sand from Abbey Wood, a fossil-rich site in southeast London.
Seven-year-old James, who lives near Wareham in Dorset, found an array of shells and other fossils to take home, but happened upon a tooth that he, his mum and the scientists on the stall couldn’t immediately identify.
Dr Neil Adams, the Curator of Fossil Mammals at the Natural History Museum, identified the find, which has now been donated to the museum, as a rare fossil tooth from an ancient animal called Prototomus.
James commented: “Looking for fossils is a really fun thing to do. I enjoyed knowing that if I found something I liked I got to take it home. My favourite things were the animal teeth. I found lots of shark teeth and the mammal tooth. It was weird to come across the mammal tooth because it had so many points on it and I didn’t know what it was.”
This small predator lived more than 55 million years ago, and its remains can reveal what life was like at the time. It belonged to a group of animals known as the hyaenodonts and would have been about the size of a weasel or mongoose.
By studying fossils such as this one from Prototomus, researchers hope to get a better idea of how this group of animals evolved. Later hyaenodonta, such as Hyaenodon, grew much larger, up to the size of a wolf.
Neil commented: “These fossils are pretty rare, and there’s only a handful of Prototomus remains in our collections. It’s a very nice find, as we don’t know a lot about this animal. Even though it’s just a single tooth, studying the dental microwear on it could reveal more about the last days to weeks of the animal’s life, and what it was eating. Not a lot of this microwear research has been done on early Eocene mammals, especially the carnivores, so
I think there’s a lot of interesting work to come.”
The Abbey Wood site is renowned for ancient remains from the start of the Eocene, a time when many modern mammal lineages have their origins.
Three of the Natural History Museum’s Scientific Associates, Jerry Hooker and David and Alison Ward, lead regular digs at the site as they investigate Europe’s Eocene past.
Over the years, they have excavated hundreds of kilogrammes of sand for study, with much of it sorted through by members of the public at the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival. The work of these volunteers is invaluable to the researchers. In 2024 alone, over 500 people sorted through more than 210 kilogrammes of sand from Abbey Wood.
As part of a regular offering at the annual Lyme Regis Fossil Festival, visitors to NHM’s stand were given the chance to sift through sand from Abbey Wood, a fossil-rich site in southeast London.
Seven-year-old James, who lives near Wareham in Dorset, found an array of shells and other fossils to take home, but happened upon a tooth that he, his mum and the scientists on the stall couldn’t immediately identify.
Dr Neil Adams, the Curator of Fossil Mammals at the Natural History Museum, identified the find, which has now been donated to the museum, as a rare fossil tooth from an ancient animal called Prototomus.
James commented: “Looking for fossils is a really fun thing to do. I enjoyed knowing that if I found something I liked I got to take it home. My favourite things were the animal teeth. I found lots of shark teeth and the mammal tooth. It was weird to come across the mammal tooth because it had so many points on it and I didn’t know what it was.”
This small predator lived more than 55 million years ago, and its remains can reveal what life was like at the time. It belonged to a group of animals known as the hyaenodonts and would have been about the size of a weasel or mongoose.
By studying fossils such as this one from Prototomus, researchers hope to get a better idea of how this group of animals evolved. Later hyaenodonta, such as Hyaenodon, grew much larger, up to the size of a wolf.
Neil commented: “These fossils are pretty rare, and there’s only a handful of Prototomus remains in our collections. It’s a very nice find, as we don’t know a lot about this animal. Even though it’s just a single tooth, studying the dental microwear on it could reveal more about the last days to weeks of the animal’s life, and what it was eating. Not a lot of this microwear research has been done on early Eocene mammals, especially the carnivores, so
I think there’s a lot of interesting work to come.”
The Abbey Wood site is renowned for ancient remains from the start of the Eocene, a time when many modern mammal lineages have their origins.
Three of the Natural History Museum’s Scientific Associates, Jerry Hooker and David and Alison Ward, lead regular digs at the site as they investigate Europe’s Eocene past.
Over the years, they have excavated hundreds of kilogrammes of sand for study, with much of it sorted through by members of the public at the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival. The work of these volunteers is invaluable to the researchers. In 2024 alone, over 500 people sorted through more than 210 kilogrammes of sand from Abbey Wood.
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