Introduction

While exploring the foreshore at Bexhill Beach over the last couple of days, I came across several remarkable features preserved in the rock – dinosaur footprints dating back roughly 135 million years to the Early Cretaceous period.

The Sussex coast exposes rocks from the Ashdown Formation, part of the Wealden Group. At the time these sediments were forming, this area wasn’t coastline at all. It was a warm river floodplain with muddy riverbanks, shallow lagoons and dense vegetation. Dinosaurs walked across these mudflats, leaving footprints that were buried by sediment and eventually turned into rock.

Coastal erosion along the foreshore is now slowly revealing parts of that ancient landscape again.

YouTube Video

I filmed several of these footprints during my recent visits to Bexhill beach and I have put together a video explaining the tracks and how they formed.

👉 Subscribe to my YouTube channel here to see the video

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Casts and Impressions

Interestingly, two different types of footprints can be seen on the Bexhill foreshore.

📍 Google Maps location: 50.837650, 0.483188

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Some appear as raised shapes, known as natural casts. These form when a dinosaur footprint fills with sediment which later hardens. As the surrounding rock erodes away, the filled footprint can remain standing proud of the surface.

📍 Google Maps location: 50.836672, 0.475356

📍 what3words: ///gained.gent.funded

Others appear as true impressions – the actual depressions left when a dinosaur stepped into soft mud millions of years ago.

Finding both types close together strongly suggests that the rock surface represents part of the original ancient mudflat where dinosaurs once walked.

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What Dinosaur Made These Tracks?

The footprints show the classic three-toed (tridactyl) shape typical of ornithopod dinosaurs, a group that includes animals such as Iguanodon which are well known from the Wealden rocks of Sussex.

Palaeontologists usually classify footprints by their track type rather than a specific species, but the general form is consistent with plant-eating dinosaurs that roamed this region during the Early Cretaceous.

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Photographing Dinosaur Footprints

Photographing dinosaur footprints can be surprisingly challenging because the shape and definition of the track changes dramatically depending on the angle you shoot from. A top-down “reference” shot will show the footprint most clearly, but it often loses the surrounding context. For more dramatic images, getting low to the ground with a wide-angle lens can make the footprint dominate the foreground while the landscape – such as the sea or sunrise – provides context behind it. The trade-off is that the footprint may appear less defined from this lower perspective, so careful positioning and composition are important.

Surface glare and debris can also affect how clearly the footprint appears in photographs. A polarising filter can help reduce reflections on wet rock and bring out texture in the sandstone. If the track is covered with loose sand or grit, gently rinsing it with a little seawater can reveal the shape more clearly before taking the shot. Finally, consider shooting wider than you need and cropping later – this allows you to create both a documentary reference image and a more aesthetic composition that emphasises the footprint within the wider landscape.

Location

Several people have asked where these footprints can be found.

They are located on the foreshore near Bexhill when the tide is very low, as the rock platform needs to be exposed.

See the google and what3words above under each photo.

Because the footprints are on the intertidal rock platform, they are best viewed around low tide.

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A Glimpse Into Deep Time

Standing on this rock today, it’s quite remarkable to think that the surface beneath your feet was once a muddy riverbank walked on by dinosaurs over 135 million years ago.

Thanks to the constant action of the sea slowly wearing away the cliffs and foreshore, these ancient traces occasionally reappear – giving us a rare glimpse into a landscape from the age of dinosaurs.

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If you visit the site, please take care around the rocks and avoid damaging the footprints so others can enjoy seeing them too.

If you’d like to see more locations like this across Sussex, you can explore them on the Sussex Photography map collection on the site.