The Etches Collection (also known as the Museum of Jurassic Marine Life)
is an independent fossil museum located in the village of
Kimmeridge
Kimmeridge () is a small village and civil parish on the Isle of Purbeck, a peninsula on the English Channel coast in Dorset, England. It is situated about south of Wareham and west of Swanage. In 2013 the estimated population of the civil ...
,
Dorset
Dorset ( ; Archaism, archaically: Dorsetshire , ) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South West England. It is bordered by Somerset to the north-west, Wiltshire to the north and the north-east, Hampshire to the east, t ...
, England.
It is based on the lifetime collection of
Steve Etches
Steve Etches, MBE (born in 1949) is an English plumber, fossil collector and preparator in Kimmeridge, on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset. From an early age on, Etches began to find, collect and restore the fossils he found on the Jurassic Coast ...
, a fossil hunter for whom some of his finds have been named,
from the local area on the
Jurassic Coast
The Jurassic Coast, also known as the Dorset and East Devon Coast, is a World Heritage Site on the English Channel coast of southern England. It stretches from Exmouth in East Devon to Studland Bay in Dorset, a distance of about , and was ins ...
, a
SSSI
A Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) in Great Britain, or an Area of Special Scientific Interest (ASSI) in the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland, is a conservation designation denoting a protected area in the United Kingdom and Isle ...
and
World Heritage Site
World Heritage Sites are landmarks and areas with legal protection under an treaty, international treaty administered by UNESCO for having cultural, historical, or scientific significance. The sites are judged to contain "cultural and natural ...
,
especially around
Kimmeridge Bay
Kimmeridge Bay () is a bay on the Isle of Purbeck, a peninsula on the English Channel coast in Dorset, England, close to and southeast of the village of Kimmeridge, on the Smedmore Estate. The area is renowned for its fossils, with The Etche ...
and the
Kimmeridge Ledges.
Building
The museum building was opened in 2016 at a cost of £5 million to house a collection of over 2,000 fossil specimens so that they would remain accessible beyond the lifetime of Steve Etches.
Collection
Etches had been collecting for over 30 years prior to the museum opening,
and in that time he amassed a collection of fossils of international scientific importance that form the basis of the collection.
The collection includes examples of
ammonite
Ammonoids are extinct, (typically) coiled-shelled cephalopods comprising the subclass Ammonoidea. They are more closely related to living octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish (which comprise the clade Coleoidea) than they are to nautiluses (family N ...
eggs and fossils from the Upper Jurassic
Kimmeridge Clay Formation
The Kimmeridge Clay is a sedimentary rock, sedimentary deposit of fossiliferous marine clay which is of Late Jurassic to lowermost Cretaceous age and occurs in southern and eastern England and in the North Sea. This rock formation (geology), form ...
including ''
Thalassodraco etchesi''.
See also
*
List of museums in Dorset
A list is a set of discrete items of information collected and set forth in some format for utility, entertainment, or other purposes. A list may be memorialized in any number of ways, including existing only in the mind of the list-maker, but ...
References
External links
The Etches Collection website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Etches Collection
2016 establishments in England
Museums established in 2016
Biographical museums in Dorset
Geology museums in England
Fossil museums in the United Kingdom
Collections of museums in the United Kingdom
Isle of Purbeck
Jurassic Coast