The Yorkshire Fossil Festival Heads To Whitby – 2023 Highlights!

Highlights of this year’s Yorkshire Fossil Festival, which takes place in Whitby for the first time on 10 and 11 June, have been announced.

The festival will celebrate the 200th birthday of Whitby Museum, and the historic venue will invite festival-goers behind the scenes for a special after-hours ‘Night at the Museum’. It will also host talks by a couple who discovered an Ice Age mammoth graveyard and by a world-leading dinosaur expert, who will tell the stupendous story of Stegosaurus.

Sally and Neville Hollingworth were hunting for marine fossils in Wiltshire when they uncovered the remains of five mammoths. The couple later featured on a BBC documentary, Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard, hosted by naturalist Sir David Attenborough. They will be displaying some of their amazing finds for the first time at the festival.

Dr Susannah Maidment from the Natural History Museum is one of the world’s leading dinosaur palaeontologists. She will be telling mega-stories about Stegosaurus.

And for the first time, the festival will be running a Museum After Hours science cabaret in Whitby Museum on the evening of Saturday 10 June. This one-off event will feature science talks and performance art created specially for the spectacular heritage venue, and will conclude with a mass singalong of festival co-organiser Dr Liam Herringshaw’s ‘palae-oke’ reworking of disco classic I Will Survive.

The festival will be a weekend of two halves:

Saturday on the Streets (10 June) will see the festival take over as much of Whitby as possible from 10am to 4pm, with last year’s ringmaster Steve Cousins, also known as The Rock Showman, and his team of Let's Circus performers at Dock End, and lots to see and do at Whitby Museum and in Pannett Park.

Sunday Funday (11 June) will be a party in the park, as the whole festival – incuding the circus – moves to Pannett Park and Whitby Museum, for a fun-packed family day of free, fossil-flavoured fun, from 10am to 4pm.

Throughout the festival, visitors will also get the chance to see a big old log in Whitby Museum, as the world's largest specimen of Whitby jet goes on display for the weekend, courtesy of the Museum of Whitby Jet.

A new Love Exploring quiz game has been created specially for the festival, bringing an array of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures to Whitby. Many have special links to the town, and players will use a map to track them across Whitby, testing their fossil knowledge as they do so.

Steve Cousins, The Rock Showman, was the ebullient and hugely popular master of ceremonies of last year’s festival, at Scarborough Spa, and will return this year as festival co-director. Both days of the festival will feature free, family entertainment by international artists from Australia, Mexico, Japan and India, alongside local performers: a vibrant mix of music, circus, puppetry, and street theatre popping up across Whitby over the weekend.

Dr Rebecca Bennion, a Whitby palaeontologist who is a creative producer of this year’s festival, says:
"I'm very excited to be part of the team bringing the Yorkshire Fossil Festival to Whitby for the first time! It is going to be a fantastic opportunity for people of all ages to celebrate the town's fossil heritage and meet world-leading experts.”

Roger Osborne, curator of geology at Whitby Museum, says:
"We’re really thrilled to be celebrating the museum’s bicentenary with this wonderful festival. Amongst so many other things, it’s a chance for visitors to see a new display of the museum’s famous ammonite fossils including giant specimens up to half a metre across. Whitby is world famous for its ammonite fossils, and the museum has one of the best collections anywhere. Our new display shows them off in the best way possible.”

The 2023 Yorkshire Fossil Festival is organised by Whitby Museum, Scarborough Museums and Galleries, and Let's Circus, with funding from Arts Council England, the Normanby Trust, the Palaeontological Association, the Geologists’ Association and the Yorkshire Geological Society.