This piece of art was unveiled in Stamford on 9th December 2021, inspired by and commemorating Alan Dawn, a long-time volunteer at Peterborough Museum.
The work, called Stamford’s Stone Heritage by Jason Duckmanton, was commissioned by the local non-profit arts organisation Art Pop-Up, supported by the Arts Council.
Alan was the founder of the Stamford and District Geological Society and for many years was instrumental in helping us care for and add to our important collection of Jurassic fossils.
One of the plesiosaurs he discovered, Pachycostasaurus dawnii, was named after Alan and is currently on display in the museum gallery. It is one of several new species named for him from the Oxford Clay.
If you are passing by the museum, pop in to take a look at Alan’s discovery for yourself.
I have added words from Jeff Liston, whom many of you know, about Alan on his death in 2010 below. I had known Alan for a while before his involvement in the fish dig through my friend and mentor Arthur Cruickshank, who co-authored the paper describing Pachycostasaurus, and in the museum in Peterborough where I studied some of the specimens he had found.
Richard Forrest
31st December 2021
Alan Dawn 1923–2010
Many of you will by now have heard the sad news of the recent passing of Alan Dawn, President of the Stamford and District Geological Society. Born into a farming family in 1923, he attained, after wartime call-up to the Royal Navy, a degree in geography at nearby Sheffield University, which led to a career in teaching, bringing him to Stamford in 1961. Shortly after arriving, he became interested in geology and began taking adult education classes in the subject, later being asked to give the classes himself. By 1982 he and his wife Pauline had channelled that enthusiasm into forming the Stamford and District Geological Society.
To an extent, it was with his retirement from teaching that his palaeontological career hit its stride. He volunteered with Peterborough Museum, with which he shall always be associated, to obtain, mount, prepare and cast local fossil material, both Pleistocene mammal and the marine fauna of the Middle Jurassic Oxford Clay, several taxa of which have been named in his honour. This linked the engine of the Stamford and District Geological Society to that institution. As a result, in 1990 he became the first recipient of The Palaeontological Association’s Mary Anning Award for Amateur Palaeontologists, and in 1994 he was awarded the Foulton Medal from the Geological Association.
22nd October 2001: prospecting the Star Pit, with the bed yielding the remains of Leedsichthys between Alan and Dave Martill.
Although I had met him on several occasions before, it was only really with the Star Pit dig and his links to Dave Martill, with whom he regularly went collecting, that I got to know him personally. A stalwart contributor to that excavation, he clocked up 41 days in the effort to recover the most complete specimen of Leedsichthys problematicus known. He acted as the main liaison with Hanson Brick, the owners of the pit, and was extremely effective in local fundraising to allow the dig to continue for as long as it did.
When the dig finally closed in Autumn 2003, most of us felt that the 2,300 separately collected parts of that specimen would remain carefully covered in Paraloid B72 in their plaster jackets in storage under the aegis of Peterborough Museum in perpetuity. And yet earlier this year Alan reported that he had started work with his team on preparing the last specimen, the exceptionally fragile one-and-a-half-metre-long left pectoral fin, from its plaster jacket. That is a truly phenomenal quantity of hours of voluntary work and a stunning achievement.
His role as a teacher, and his zeal for spreading enthusiasm about palaeontology, as well as orchids, never left him, as anyone who went on his field trips or brought him specimens for identification could testify.
I last spoke to him a couple of weeks ago. He called to say he was attending a talk in Leicester and wondered if I could bring the last of the Star Pit bones, which I had borrowed to study some years earlier, back to him so they could be returned to Peterborough Museum. When I arrived at Leicester University on October 20th, I was anxious that Alan was not present in the audience and wondered if his long run of dodging major medical problems had finally run out. Although he believed he was suffering from flu, it was later diagnosed as pneumonia. He appeared to recover and was moved out of the high-dependency unit, only to die in his sleep on Saturday night in Peterborough District Hospital.
August 2002: Alan Dawn plastering the right pectoral fin in the rain at the Star Pit.
Alan Dawn was a legendary character, and Oxford Clay palaeontology has been greatly enriched by his huge personal contribution. We mourn his passing.
Jeff Liston
5th November 2010