Britain’s Jurassic gold rush: the fossil hunters chasing fortunes on Dorset’s beaches

Social media and soaring prices are fuelling a fossil-hunting boom, with rare discoveries worth thousands of pounds

Bent double at the waist, Martin Curtis combs a stretch of a Dorset beach with the concentration of a man searching for a lost cufflink or wedding ring.

The search is meticulous – and with good reason. What he hopes to find could be far more valuable than an errant piece of jewellery. Curtis is searching instead for the telltale spiral of an ammonite, the star-shaped rod of a crinoid or rocks of a particular shape and colour that suggests there is something very special inside. He is hunting fossils.