Plumbing The Depths
This is the remarkable story of how Dorset plumber Steve Etches (above) became a world-renowned palaeontologist and his discovery and bringing to life of a lost world. An underwater world that lay beneath the tropical Jurassic seas over 150 million years ago. A time when some of the most fearsome sea creatures that have ever lived were at their apex of evolution.
More surprising still is the fact Steve has achieved all this with no formal academic qualifications and worked as a professional plumber for 43 years. What started as a childhood hobby grew into a lifelong obsession and a lifetime of fossil hunting and collecting. Following in the footsteps of other great 19th century fossil hunter pioneers such as Mary Anning, Steve has discovered over thirty new species and a whole Jurassic marine ecosystem. From fossilised plankton to giant marine reptiles such as the awesome Pliosaur or the Loch Ness Monster like Pleisiosaur. Remarkable still is that these discoveries were made along the Jurassic coast line in Southern Britain that was thought to be barren of fossils. Steve͛s collection is a revelation and tells the story not only about the history of our planet but provides a tantalising glimpse into the future.
Today, Steve has become one of the world͛s most respected and honoured palaeontologists showered with awards and accolades including the Mary Anning Prize, the Halstead Medal and in June 2014 he received an MBE and an honorary Doctorate from Southampton University. Not bad for a boy who left school having only passed metal work!
With exclusive access, we follow Steve as he makes new discoveries, many totally new to science, and captured live on camera. He realises a life-long dream to find a permanent home for his collection with the building of a multi-million-pound state of the art museum, a few doors down from his home in Kimmeridge. The museum does not just house the collection but also Steve himself behind glass! If he is not fossil hunting on Kimmeridge Bay after a full moon or heavy storm, he can often be seen on display in the public gallery through a glazed screen preparing the next specimen for display or analysis. Where can you meet the collector and their collection in the same place? Who needs multimedia interactive when you can talk to a live fossil hunter!
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Curating Space-Collection relocated from Steve’s sitting room and garage to a state of the art museum.
The Original JAWS – five years in the making
Steve Etches first major and significant find was back in 1982 when he spotted chunks of bone strewn over the beach and immediately identified them as part of a Pliosaur jaw belonging to one of the most ferocious reptiles of the Jurassic deep. When he went back to explore the area for the tooth-bearing part of the jaw, missing from his haul, he spotted a bone sticking out of the cliff high above him.
Hundreds of times he returned to the same spot, waiting for the cliff to crumble and surrender its treasure. Each time, he was disappointed. Finally, a full four years later he found a gap in the cliff above and a massive pile as big as a room, of limestone, grass, rubble and shale on the beach.
"I was shaking like a leaf, I was so excited. I just pulled off the top of the shale and there was this great jaw stuck up. I tried to carry as much as I could back in my rucksack. Damaged my back for about five years, but I hardly noticed at the time. I had to get help from the blokes who worked with me in the end. All plumbers. Useless as ͚cows with muskets͛ they were at finding what we were looking for, but in the end, we found everything, all bar 5 or 6 teeth and one bone. I kept looking but the next week we had a huge storm and the sea washed the whole lot away".
Sometimes collecting is a desperate race for time. Bringing home, a Pterosaur wing (flying reptile) was one of them, with darkness falling, the tide roaring in and the bones incarcerated in such huge, heavy slabs of shale that one man was incapable of carrying them.
"As I stumbled along, hardly able to move for the weight in my old rucksack, I actually thought: If I have a heart attack and die, I hope they realise there͛s something bloody good in the rucksack that I͛d died for" Steve Etches remembers.
"Panic was setting in. The sea getting closer, the light was going, I was losing control of the situation". Steve was rescued in the nick of time by his two sons and wife before the headland was totally cut off by the tide. When asked was it worth going out literally on a limb? For Steve, it was well worth it as it turned out to be a completely new species of Pterosaur.
While hauling lumps of rock from a threatening sea might appear to be the most gruelling part of retrieving fossils, that͛s just the beginning.
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Steve with his latest catch- a 150 million-year-old Plesiosaur
According to Steve: The preparation of the fossil is the most critical process of the whole enterprise. If one single feature is obliterated by bad preparation, half the scientific information is lost. The key to that preparation is having the right tools. The tools range from air pens to heavy diamond grinders depending on the hardness of the rock. The work is both an art and science, intuitive, exact and labour intensive. The preparation of a 10-foot Ichthyosaurus will typically take Steve, with painstaking work, 6-9 months.
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Making Waves
This programme/series goes behind the scenes and reveals for the first time on television several major new discoveries to science. Through time lapse footage we reveal Steve͛s latest sea monster, a giant Plesiosaur to emerge from a slab of rock. We follow the whole procedure like a forensic autopsy. Will it be a new species and how did it die? In the process Steve discovers evidence of predation and what and who might have been the cause of death.
We take a ride in Steve͛s pick-up truck with some unusual passengers. Apart from Steve͛s gun dog in the back there are two unassuming boxes with specimens that have an appointment at Southampton University. It is here where Europe͛s highest resolution X-Ray topographic imaging unit can be found offering advanced 3D results. One of the boxes contains a skull from a possible new Crocodile species and the other an egg sac from an Ammonite. Despite their abundance in the fossil record nothing is known about how they reproduced. This might be the first evidence of embryonic marine life yet discovered from the Jurassic sea. A world first! This will be revealed for the first time on television along with the discovery of one of Darwin͛s missing links!
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Scanning the skull of a new species of crocodile Possible Embryonic Ammonite eggs- a world first!
Each fossil specimen is presented and interpreted to bring to life their individual stories. Together they build a picture of how these creatures lived, bred and died. How they adapted to their surroundings and evolved over time.
Rock Stars and special guest appearances
During filming Steve has some surprising visitors to the museum including another Rock legend, Ian Gillan, lead singer for the rock band Deep Purple. Ian takes a break from recording his latest album in Hamburg and flies in specially to meet Steve. Ian is a local and draws inspiration for his music from the area. We capture the moment when both Rock stars meet for the first time and Ian is given the opportunity to work on the Plesiosaur with Steve supervising.
Comedy icon and wildlife presenter Bill Oddie drops by to look at Steve͛s flying reptile collection of Pterosaurs. Again, Steve reveals some new Pterosaur remains that are new to science and they discuss parallels with modern birds. Other local celeb museum supporters include Emilia and Edward Fox along with Sir Michael Hobbs, museum trustee and the Director of the 5
British Museum, who is another trustee and local resident. Visiting academics and TV Presenter include Professor Ian Stewart from Portsmouth University, Professor Andrew Gale and Dr Neil Gosling (Senior Teaching Fellow at Southampton University to name just a few.)
This remarkable story is the result of one man͛s passion or rather life-long obsession. Over thirty years of discovery and diligent research, dogged determination not just to find and collect, but also to bring to life the amazing stories of the creatures that existed in the Jurassic age.
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