Hardraw Force waterfall just outside Hawes, sitting just behind the Green Dragon Inn is probably best remembered for being a location in the film Robin Hood Prince of Thieves where Kevin Costner as Robin Hood is spied on whilst bathing by Maid Marion.
It is also actually England’s largest single drop waterfall with a continuous drop of over 100ft which is a very impressive site. The waterfall is actually caused by the Carboniferous rock formations in the location being part of something called the Yoredale Series where water from Hardraw Beck flows over a hard rock lip into a plunge pool below.
The Yoredale Series is where on top of layers of the traditional Dales limestone (which was formed under a deep tropical sea about 350 million years ago), the landscape altered in relatively quick succession laying down alternating layers of gritstone & sandstone, thin coal measures and mudstones which later became shales.
An important find
Back in the 1960’s a schoolboy studying the rocks in the area, collected rocks from behind the falls. The boy John Chapman collected a number of these sandy blocks which he then gave to his teacher Stuart Maude.
These blocks were formed when Yorkshire stopped being beneath a shallow tropical sea when sea levels dropped, with sediments being washed into the area forming a sandy delta, where a swamp formed.
The teacher had noticed some strange markings on one of the blocks and used the rocks for many years during his Geology lessons.
The teacher, Mr Maude eventually donated the block to The National History Museum in London back in 1978, where it was logged and filed away.
Further analysis
In 2019, the rock was given to Hannah Bird from the University of Birmingham for further investigation. She had suspected that the rock had a story to tell so joined forces with Dr Angela Milner a scientific associate at the Natural History Museum to create a 3D model of the rock as she suspected the markings could be very important early footprints.
The modelling reaped significant rewards.
For a previous research project, Hannah had identified the specimen as potentially one of the oldest set of footprints in the UK.
She explained “It was a matter of validating whether this was the case or not, including comparing them to other footprints from other localities across the world to evaluate timescales. From that we concluded that they were the oldest footprints of this type”.
A picture below shows half a dozen early amphibian footprints – thank you to the Trustees of the Natural History Museum for the use of this image.
Life on Land
At the time the sandy blocks were formed there were no mammals on earth, but the sea was bursting with life. It was at this time that we see the transition from fish to land dwelling creatures, starting with early amphibians.
Hannah Bird had identified the tracks of an ancient relative of amphibians known as Edopoid Temnospondyl. These tracks would have formed when the creature walked over some of the soft sediment of the river delta.
They are definitely amphibian of origin rather than reptilian because of the shorter, broader stubby digits.
It is worth remembering that we as humans evolved from these early life forms, as these creatures colonised the land and evolved over millions of years.
Croco-manders
Angela Milner from the Natural History Museum also explained “some of these early amphibians grew to great sizes and are known to have grown to the same size as modern day crocodiles, although they would have walked like modern day salamanders. They still needed to return to the water to breed, but some of my colleagues have nick named the species a Croco-mander!
The tracks found at Hardraw are believed to be from a specimen between 50 and 75cm long.
The Edopoid Temnospondyl name roughly translates as “gluton faced animals”
The oldest fossil footprint tracks ever found in the UK
What makes these fossil tacks so important is that previously there were no footprints of these animals of that age in the UK. Nothing like this has been found in Britain before. The rock sample from Hardraw in the Dales was found over 50 years earlier, but is now recognised as an example of the oldest record of amphibian tracks (or any 4 legged creature) ever recorded in the UK.
The original block is now on permanent display in the Natural History Museum and a replica in Cliff Castle Museum in Keighley.
So a dragon of sorts did used to exist at The Green Dragon!
Abstract from Hannah Bird’s Paper published in the Journal of the Geological Society
The ichnological fossil record has previously provided key evidence for the diversification of land vertebrates (tetrapods) during the Carboniferous Period, following the invasion of the land. Within the UK, tetrapod ichnofossils from the late Carboniferous of the English Midlands are well documented, but few such fossils are known from earlier in the period. We present a rare ichnological insight into early Carboniferous tetrapod diversification in the United Kingdom based on a Visean-aged specimen collected from an interdistributary trough palaeoenvironment at Hardraw Scar, Wensleydale, North Yorkshire.
This specimen represents the stratigraphically oldest known tetrapod trackway from the UK. We refer this specimen to Palaeosauropus sp., providing the earliest known occurrence of an edopoid temnospondyl. Supplementing the sparse record of contemporary body fossils from the early Carboniferous, this provides further insights into the diversification of temnospondyl amphibians across Euramerica.
Reference:Hannah C. Bird et al. A lower Carboniferous (Visean) tetrapod trackway represents the earliest record of an edopoid amphibian from the UK, Journal of the Geological Society (2019). DOI: 10.1144/jgs2019-149
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