Enter the dragon

Talk about timing. Just as Walking With Dinosaurs is big on our screens again, and just as tourism chiefs in Scarborough are talking about dinosaur walk holidays as a way of bringing holidaymakers flocking back to the Yorkshire coast, along comes Ike.

Actually, the giant marine reptile whose remains have lain buried near Whitby for 185 million years and who was dug up last week doesn't actually have a name, yet.

But since he's known to be an ichthyosaur, Ike seems appropriate.

When he died, Yorkshire would have been covered in warm, Jurassic seas. What is now the Yorkshire coastline would have been a deeper trough in the middle of a shallow, tropical ocean just north of the equator.

Ike, being a reptile, was air-breathing: which meant he had to live near the surface of the sea. Teeming in the warm tropical waters all around him would have been other icthyosaurs, even bigger giant sea reptiles like the long-necked plesiosaurs and giant pliosaurs, with their thick necks, huge heads and massive jaws - and a host of smaller creatures, from ancient squid-like animals to early boney fish similar to cod and herring.

A lot of this we know thanks to Ike himself. The Yorkshire coast has long been a rich source of fossils. But Ike isn't just any fossil. He is the most perfect ichthyosaur ever discovered in Britain. Examination of the giant, 14-foot-long fossil has already revealed Ike's last meal was a long-extinct squid-like creature, known as a belemnite, and fish similar to modern cod.

"Belemnites were squid-like creatures which had hooklets on their tentacles," says Dr Phil Manning, keeper of geology at the Yorkshire Museum who led the dig last week in which Ike's fossilised remains were carefully removed from the cliff face.

"These hooklets were indigestible. We have a pool of belemnite hooklets, along with fish scales. They would have been quite modern-looking fish, like early cod or herring."

Perhaps even more important, vital hip-bones - missing on all previous ichthyosaur finds in Britain - mean experts hope to identify precisely what type of ichthyosaur Ike was. He can then be compared with other types of ichthyosaur found elsewhere around the world. Once they know what group he belongs to experts should be able to get a much clearer picture of the type of marine life that would have lived in the warm Yorkshire seas along with Ike.

Phil Manning says ichthyosaurs were among the most feared predators in the Jurassic seas. But there were other sea-monsters even more fearsome.

"Ichthyosaurs were high up in the food chain. There wasn't much they were frightened of, but they would have been pretty worried by some of the big pliosaurs - not Liopleurodon (the giant sea reptile featured in the BBC's Walking With Dinosaurs series, which wasn't found here), but perhaps Rhomaleosaurus, which wasn't quite as big."

Ike was discovered on July 4 last year. Driffield-based amateur fossil hunter Brian Foster was looking for fossils along the coast near Whitby. The tide was in: so he climbed half-way up the cliff-face to a terrace. There, he spotted Ike's nose sticking out of the ground. He reported it to the Yorkshire Museum, who got funding from the BBC to carry out a dig.

That took place last week - a team of 15 experts and enthusiastic amateurs worked 15-hour shifts to remove Ike from the rock in just five days. "You have to do it very quickly once you have started the dig because it is exposed to the elements," explains Dr Manning.

The entire dig was recorded by the BBC - and the programme, Raising The Sea Dragon, will be broadcast on BBC Knowledge, the digital channel, in October. More funding, though - Dr Manning estimates about £10,000 - is needed to prepare the fossil remains, which are now in storage, for display.

Ike, as any child will tell you, wasn't actually a dinosaur at all - he was a sea-living reptile who looked a little like a large and rather vicious dolphin.

To make things even more exciting real dinosaur footprints - as many as 80 of them - have also been discovered near the site of Ike's remains.

That doesn't mean dinosaurs could walk on water. The footprints are from 175 million years ago - about ten million years more recently than Ike's fossil, by which time the Jurassic seas over Yorkshire had given way to a low-lying flood plain.

The Yorkshire Museum hasn't yet been able to excavate the footprints - but already it has identified a number of dinosaur types which left their marks forever in the rock.

They include tiny birdlike dinosaurs not much bigger than a chicken, much larger herbivorous dinosaurs which look similar to Camptosaurus - a relative of Iguanadon which also featured in Walking With Dinosaurs - and a number of carnivorous dinosaurs.

Palaeontologists are reluctant to give a definitive identification of a dinosaur based only on footprints, because these can be distorted over time. "But there look to be a variety of animals, some of which have not been recorded before on the Yorkshire coast," says Dr Manning.

The footprints represent a 'snapshot' of time. "The prints would have been left over a very short period of time - hours or days," says Dr Manning. "There are about 80 footprints in a single block of stone, which we are looking to recover.

"The key thing about footprints is that they put the dinosaur at the scene of the crime - fossilised remains could have moved, but not footprints. You can learn a lot about the environment in which they lived, and you can work out how they walked, and how the animals' legs moved.

"You can also get some information about group dynamics and herd behaviour - but you have to be careful, because you can never be sure whether it was one animal being demented and running around in a circle creating thousands of footprints."

That's probably pretty much how the amateur fossil-hunters will be behaving on Yorkshire's coastal cliffs in the wake of the recent discoveries. Reason enough why the exact location where the fossils were found is being kept a closely-guarded secret.

One thing's for sure. The discovery has certainly put the Yorkshire coast back on the map.

Good timing indeed.

PICTURE: Dr Phil Manning, keeper of geology at the Yorkshire Museum, with an

opthalmosaurus, a close relation of the sea dragon found near Whitby