Huddersfield has been around for a long time.
More than a thousand years ago there were Romans striding up and down the roads of Outlane.
No doubt the hardy legionnaires wished they were back in sun soaked Tuscany enjoying a drop of the grape rather than trudging up and down muddy tracks in Yorkshire.
What about the folk who used to live on Castle Hill?
Before Outlanius Maxiumus or whatever our Caesar-loving chum was called, there had been folk in Huddersfield for donkeys.
In the mesolithic era, which seems to have been about 10,000 years ago, there were people living on the hill.
At that time there were huge swathes of forest across what is now Kirklees and up around the hill.
However much like today there was no pub up there.
Imagine the life of a simple mesolithic Huddersfieldian: sloping off to try and find water before carrying it all the way back up the hill, hunting for food rather than getting chicken and chips on King Street.
They didn’t even have a Merrie England back then, the poor devils.
Yes, Huddersfield has been around for a long time - but so has Yorkshire.
I know county boundaries are generally only a geographical concept rather than actually a physical boundary but it seems even in pre-historic times there was something special about the White Rose - and that was tens of millions of years before it was called such.
Why all this peering into the past I hear you ask ... at least that’s what I think you said.
Well dear reader, there has been yet another discovery made in our area which has knocked spots off stuff discovered either over the Pennines or (holds nose) down south.
A man looking for dinosaur bones on the coast near Whitby got the shock of his life when some rock became dislodged and, I presume, nearly clouted him.
Looking closer at the fall he noticed that it wasn’t just rock - it was a fossil.
But it turns out that it wasn’t any fossil - it was a bone from one of the earliest known sauropod dinosaurs ever found.
The sauropods are the ones that have long necks and tails but quite small brains. Lancastrians may say little has changed in the intervening millennia in Yorkshire.
Cross-Pennine rivalry aside it seems that Yorkshire was home to flocks/swarms/herds of Diplodoci (is that the plural of Diplodocus?) years ago.
The neck bone found in Whitby is just under a foot long by about four inches wide and weighs in at two-and-a-half stone.
You’d need a big polo neck to keep this lad warm.
“The Jurassic Park that was once Yorkshire clearly has much more to offer science in our understanding of the distribution and evolution of dinosaurs,” said Dr Victoria Egerton, co-author of a scientific paper about the find.
So far only one bone has been discovered so archaeologists are unable to say whether it’s a new species.
But that hasn’t stopped the man who found said bone naming it.
And like all good Yorkshire dinosaurs it’s got a proper name.
There’s none of this brontosaurus nonsense: they Whitby dinosaur’s name?
Alan of course.
