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The Fossil Forest lies east of Lulworth Cove, concealed half-way down the cliff on the edge of the army firing ranges. As we descend the rough wooden staircase that leads to the limestone ledge, we pass the folded strata of the upper broken beds, where the compressed, contorted layers of rock whorl across the cliff face like a giant fingerprint. The fossilised trees and the thrombolites (microbial mounds) that surround them were exposed when storm wave action eroded hollows in the soft rock overlaying the hard Portland stone. The remains of these ancient coniferous trees provide the most complete fossilised record of a Jurassic forest on Earth.
The majority of the trees have rotted away, leaving hollow moulds like giant barnacles and doughnuts, but at the far end of the ledge I find one trunk preserved as silicified wood. In some places the fossilised collars of algae that encrusted the trunks have formed dimpled craters up to two metres across. I come across one elongated coffin-shaped mould outlining the place where a tree must have fallen. Where the thrombolites have developed over the top of the tree stumps they mushroom out in bulbous half-moons, scabbed with orange lichen. The soil in which the trees grew is clearly visible, a dark brown seam sandwiched between pale layers of limestone.
The trees would have grown beside a saline lagoon, part of a lush tropical forest inhabited by dinosaurs. Almost 150m years later the ledge’s beach-like scree of limestone clasts is home to much smaller reptiles. As I make my way back across the boulders I spook a basking lizard, sending it scuttling into a crevice. Its stocky, beige-coloured body is patterned with cream-centred chocolate-brown spots. I am convinced that it is a sand lizard, perhaps a descendant of the captive-bred individuals released on to the neighbouring Lulworth estate in 2009 as part of a nationwide reintroduction programme.
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