How The Jurassic Coast Was Formed
The strangely shaped arms of the first pterodactyl
hung puzzlingly slender and useless and slack till
it found out that if it should jump off a cliff
and hold them at right angles, spread wide and stiff,
it could glide through the air in an elegant fashion.
This stirred up a frenzy of copycat passion
in envious ammonites, young stegosauruses,
iguanodons, trilobites, vast brontosauruses
which lined up on cliffs round the edge of Lyme Bay
and jumped. But instead of just gliding away
their journeys were downwardly vertical. Each
of them ended stone dead far below on the beach.
Which is why we now find that the Jurassic Coast
is the graveyard of many - in fact maybe most --
of those early pedestrian dreamers who found
that, unless you’re a bird, keep your feet on the ground.