""Wow, look at that! I don't believe it! Isn't it just gaaaawww-jus!" I was standing with Agnieszka on a beach on the south side of the Isle of Wight when she made this exclamation. Her accent was a curious fusion of Björk and Martine McCutcheon and she was flashing a smile so radiant it rivalled the nearby lighthouse. The object of her excitement? A black sliver of rock on the beach. Only this tiny black sliver of rock happened to be the fossilised tooth of a mighty flying pterosaur that passed this way 125 million years ago. I'd been a dinosaur hunter all of five minutes when this discovery was made … and I was hooked.
I confess that when I first stumbled across the Isle of Wight dinosaur weekends run by fossil expert Martin Simpson and his assistant Agnieszka, I was a little sceptical. Although winter is said to be the best time to look as storms reveal new finds, I had visions of hours spent chipping away with one of those miniscule pickaxes Tim Robbins uses in The Shawshank Redemption with only the outside chance of unearthing a bit of amorphous-looking bone to sustain me. What I got instead was a rip-roaring couple of days in the Cretaceous period and a bag of fossils so heavy it nearly did for the rack on my bike on the way home.
I arrived in Cowes on Friday night and settled in at the 150 – a friendly B&B full of sleek white lines. Martin picked me up the next morning and took me to his dinosaur museum, Dinosaur Farm. Inside, he led me around the collection of finds he has made over the past 30 years, throwing out extraordinary dino-tidbits (who knew that the brain of the tyrannosaurus rex was smaller than any one of its teeth?) and introducing me to Agnieszka, who took me the short distance to the beach and our date with a pterosaur tooth. As we wandered along, she told me what to look out for, helped me out with the occasional, "Ooh, now do you see anything interesting 'just there?" and imparted some nugget of knowledge on each new find. Our fossil haul soon included coral, oyster shells, snail shells and the fin spine of a shark – all more than 100 million years old. For her next trick she picked up two pieces of fool's gold and showed me how to make sparks by striking them together, before urging me up the cliffs in search of Isle of Wight diamonds (or, less romantically, selenite crystals). I found a couple, entirely unaided, which made me beam like a child.
I was still smiling inside when I met Martin for lunch in a nearby cafe. Universally known as the "fossil man", he shares his house with 46,000 of the things and once swapped his car for a mammoth tusk, as you do. He told me that the island's southern coast is losing around a metre of its sandstone cliffs to the sea each year, so more fossils are being exposed all the time.
No fewer than 29 dinosaurs have been found here over the years – Charles Darwin himself popped over before penning On the Origin of Species – which has given rise to the nickname dinosaur island.
Taking advantage of my luck in choosing the weekend of the lowest tide of the year, I ventured with Martin in the direction of France and almost immediately we came across the perfectly formed cast of an iguanodon's foot. And then another. And then another. We even discovered the smaller foot cast of a rarer dinosaur. "Possibly an allosaurus," Martin mused, "they were only 30ft long."
So not utterly terrifying then. Jumping from trunk to trunk of a fossilised forest, we swished the seaweed back with our hands in search of dinosaur bones. "They look like small jet black rocks and are patterned like the inside of a Crunchie bar," he said. I suffered the indignity of having the end of my finger nipped by a miniscule pea crab but Martin came up trumps and donated the bones we found to my burgeoning collection.
But the best was saved for last. Refreshed by a night on the town in Cowes, I returned with my guides to a third beach where, somewhat alarmingly, small chunks of cliff tumbled down before our very eyes.
Entirely unfazed, Martin and Agnieszka began scanning the strand and within a minute we found an ammonite that yesterday's tide had uncovered for the first time in 115 million years. Rather than forming a beautiful ribbed circle, however, the spiral on this one was uncurled at the end. "That's pretty rare," purred Martin. "How rare exactly?" I asked. "Oh, there are probably fewer than 50 of these in museums throughout the world," he replied nonchalantly.
The discoveries then came thick and fast. Fossilised clams and lobsters, an ammonite full of crystal, an ammonite made of fool's gold, a tiny shark's tooth, and then a "wow!" from Agnieszka alerted us to another choice discovery: a fragment of bone from a plesiosaurus, the Godzilla of marine dinosaurs.
"And what would really top it off," said Martin, "is if we were to find a green calcite ammonite … but that's very unlikely." Then, walking back along the sands to the car, there it was: a green calcite ammonite – a perfectly formed six-inch spiral that was once home to a lowly mollusc. It had evidently been washed in by the sea just a few minutes beforehand, as if to order. Jaws duly dropped.
But my favourite moment of the weekend came after we had stopped looking for fossils. We'd headed off for a celebratory lunch at Seven, a cool cafe-bar in the otherwise somnolent village of Brighstone. I was approached by a gentleman who asked me if I'd seen "the big dinosaur bones poking out of the cliff further up the beach". Intrigued, I went with him to inspect them. "Ah, my friend," I said, wishing I had a beard so that I could stroke it sagely, "what you've found here are so called 'crackers' – calcareous nodules filled with sea snails and the occasional ammonite. Very popular with Victorian collectors, I believe." He thanked me, and walked on, thus missing the sight of me punching the sky and crying a silent, "Yes!"
Watch out, fossil man, I'm only 45,953 fossils behind.
The Dinosaur hunting weekend (Friday night to Sunday afternoon) is £200 including two nights' at the B&B 150 and all meals (01983 740493, island-gems.co.uk. The Red Funnel ferry from Southampton to Cowes (0844 84499898, redfunnel.co.uk) is from £34 return for a car and up to six people, or from £12.60 return on a high-speed foot passenger ferry