The Yorkshire Fossil Festival returns to Scarborough - with new big screen films added to event

The Yorkshire Fossil Festival returns to Scarborough with a weekend of activities and events for all the family, for both enthusiasts and professionals, on site and online – and most of them free.
The event returns to Scarborough later this yearThe event returns to Scarborough later this year
The event returns to Scarborough later this year

The event, based around Scarborough’s Rotunda Museum, runs from Friday September 10 to Saturday September 12.

It will see contributions from local and national museums, universities and businesses, providing entertainment and expertise. The festival launch day on Friday September 10 will feature events especially for schools.

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Highlights of the weekend include free public talks from Dr Elsa Panciroli from the University of Oxford, author of Beasts Before Us, Professor David Bond, mass extinctions expert at the University of Hull, and Dr Anjana Khatwa, earth scientist, presenter and advocate for diversity in science.

For the first time this year, the festival has teamed up with the cinema at the Stephen Joseph Theatre to present Yorkshire FossilFilmFest, with movies including The Good Dinosaur, Jurassic Park, The Valley of Gwangi, The Land Before Time and Ammonite.

This year’s festival will also feature Yorkshire’s Favourite Fossils, with experts and members of the public teaming up to produce a top 10 of the county’s greatest palaeontological treasures. An online public vote will then be launched on Yorkshire Day, August 1, and the results announced at the festival on the afternoon of Sunday September 12.

Yorkshire Fossil Festival director Dr Liam Herringshaw says: “Fossils are natural treasures, and Yorkshire is a wonderful place to find and study them. It’s exciting to be hosting the Yorkshire Fossil Festival again, and we’re really looking forward to some great events, which will engage audiences new and old with the amazing science of palaeontology.”

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Subject to final Covid confirmation, the in-person exhibitors at this year’s Yorkshire Fossil Festival will include the Universities of Hull, Sheffield, and Leicester, the Yorkshire Geological Society, Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, and the Dinosaur Isle Museum, whilst online contributors will include the Geologists’ Association, the University of Cambridge’s Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, and the Geological Society.

The Yorkshire Fossil Festival is hosted by Scarborough Museums Trust, and supported by funding from Yorkshire Coast BID.

The festival also receives funding from the Palaeontological Association and the Geologists’ Association, and support from Hidden Horizons, the Yorkshire Geological Society and the University of Hull.

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