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Ulster dinosaurs offer invaluable insight on Ireland's past says Conor O'Brien

In his hew book Co Wicklow author Conor W O'Brien takes readers around Ireland to explore the history of natural life on our island. It's a journey from the earliest fossils to a future we humans have long been shaping, he explains

An Ammonite fossil – '200 million years ago creatures like these shared the seas of Ulster with ichtyosaurs and plesiosaurs' Conor O'Brien writes in Life In Irelnad
An Ammonite fossil – '200 million years ago creatures like these shared the seas of Ulster with ichtyosaurs and plesiosaurs' Conor O'Brien writes in Life In Irelnad An Ammonite fossil – '200 million years ago creatures like these shared the seas of Ulster with ichtyosaurs and plesiosaurs' Conor O'Brien writes in Life In Irelnad

I’VE always had a fascination with prehistoric life. The very idea that the world was once stocked with strange creatures, vastly different from the ones we see today, has captivated me since I first read about dinosaurs as a boy.

I spent a childhood looking for the clues they left behind, excavating every garden I could in my hunt for fossils. I left plenty of holes behind, but sadly had no fossils to show for my efforts.

Other fossil hunters in Ireland, though, have had far more luck than I over the centuries. We can use these clues to build up a picture of our fauna and flora as it was in ages past. With this, we can travel on a safari through time and place – from the floor of the primordial sea half a billion years ago right up to the streets of our modern cities. Along the way we can see how life in Ireland has changed, and even contemplate what the future might hold in store.

Northern Ireland has yielded some of the most spectacular fossil finds on this island. Antrim has produced the oldest woolly mammoth remains found anywhere in Ireland. In my book Life in Ireland, I explore the natural history of this Ice Age heavyweight – how it lived, fought and carved out the massive mammoth steppe across the expanse of Eurasia, as well as the forces that drove it to extinction.

Antrim’s mammoths also kept company with muskox; this is the only location in Ireland where the bones of this hardy beast have been found.

Ulster’s fossil record stretches back much further in time than the Ice Age, including a wealth of fossils from the Carboniferous, more than 300 million years ago.

Carboniferous rocks from Armagh and Derry have preserved an array of prehistoric fish – including a terrifying predator that might have lunged at prey onshore before dragging it to its doom. Even weirder are the remains of an enormous shell found in Co Down, that would have stood at least as tall as a person. In life it housed a true monster, that grasped at prey with its tentacles as it lurked above the prehistoric seabed.

But Ulster’s biggest contribution to our understanding of prehistoric Ireland has come from its Mesozoic fossils. The Mesozoic is better known as the Age of the Dinosaurs, and the northern coast has produced Ireland’s only dinosaur bones: two small pieces, one belonging to an armoured herbivore, the other to a two-legged hunter.

These are among the most westerly dinosaur remains known in Europe, and hail from a time in the early Jurassic period from which few dinosaur fossils have been found, so are very important to science.

Though discovered in the 1980s, these bones were only fully described for the first time last year. They provide us with an invaluable insight into what Ireland was like 200 million years ago.

Dinosaurs weren’t the only prehistoric reptiles to be found here. As they prevailed on land, an arguably even more remarkable reptilian revolution was under way in the oceans. Antrim’s Mesozoic deposits bear witness to this, entombing the bones of bizarre ‘sea dragons’: dolphin-like ichthyosaurs, long-necked plesiosaurs and fierce mosasaurs.

They shared the ancient sea with a menagerie of other strange and lethal creatures, from shelled ammonites hanging in the current to terrifying sharks waiting in ambush.

Of course, the saga of life in Ireland did not end with the dinosaurs or even the Ice Age. In our forests, farms, bogs and city streets, wildlife is all around us today. For thousands of years now, life in Ireland has been dominated by one species: modern humans. We have shaped the landscape and wildlife of Ireland like no creature before us.

As well as our deep past, Life in Ireland also explores the time since the arrival of man – and the immense impact this has had upon our natural world, as the fauna and flora of 21st century Ireland started to take shape.

The time since the arrival of man makes up one of the shortest chapters in the story of life here. And yet, for us, it is probably the most compelling. It encompasses Ireland’s natural history as we can still see, hear and smell it today.

And while there’s not much we can do to resurrect ecosystems that have been gone for millions of years, the wild Ireland that has coexisted with man since the last Ice Age is still here – if in a degraded state – and can still be saved if we choose to save it.

With man’s mastery of nature, a redoubled resolve to preserve it has grown. But when I wrote my book it was not to simply compile a list of the sins of our forebears against Irish wildlife. I did so also to commend the stellar conservation efforts being made to preserve nature on our changing island.

Life In Ireland – A Short History of a Long Time by Conor W O’Brien is published by Merrion Press RRP £14.99.