IT looked just look like any old piece of rock or pebble. But what fossil hunter Jamie Hiscocks had uncovered was one of the most exciting discoveries in palaeontology.

On a beach in Bexhill, he had found the world’s first known fossilised dinosaur brain, a 133-million-year-old sample of mineralised tissue from inside a dinosaur’s skull.

The well-preserved sample belongs to a relative of the Iguanodon, a herbivorous dinosaur that lived during the early Cretaceous period.

“Not in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would find anything like this,” said Jamie, who lives in Bexhill and is marking 20 years as a scientific fossil hunter.

The self-taught palaeontologist had been searching the fossil-rich shore by torchlight following a storm when the unusually shaped object jumped out at him among the piles of rock debris in 2004.

A strange texture on the surface of the lump piqued his interest and his hunch was that it was preserved soft tissue.

He asked Oxford paleobiologist Martin Brasier for his opinion and loaned him the specimen. “My hunch was verified by scientists many years later,” said Jamie. “I allowed the specimen to be studied by scientists for two years and the fossil travelled the globe. A huge scientific data set was gathered and scientific papers published on the amazing fossilised dinosaur brain.”

Among his other finds is the world’s oldest spider’s web trapped in amber. Dating back 140 million years to the Cretaceous period, the amber was found on Bexhill beach by Jamie and his brother Jonathan in 2009. The web is believed to have become trapped in amber during a forest fire. It was described by Professor Brasier as “very rare”.

Jamie found his first fossil, a dinosaur bone, 20 years ago in an exposed area of loose rocks on the beaches at Bexhill. “An acquaintance showed me his collection of fossils and from that moment on, I was hooked,” he said. “My private collection of fossils has taken 20 years to build up - not just dinosaur but a variety of animals including fish, turtle, crocodilians, lizards, amphibians, insects, plants and even fossils of giant flying reptiles called pterosaurs.”

He has been driven by the realisation that this part of the Sussex coastline had been overlooked. “When I first began collecting fossils here, geologists told me that being a coastal site with no fossiliferous cliffs, it wasn’t good fossil hunting grounds and that I probably wouldn’t find anything interesting. Intuitively, I felt there was much to discover.”

He visits Bexhill beach three or four times a month, sometimes striking lucky with a find, especially after storms have exposed new areas. He spends time preparing his finds for display and on research. “It has all been worthwhile,” he said. “I have made some great discoveries.”

As well as donating specimens to science, he also offers a selected choice of fossils for sale to museums and to private collectors.

“The best feeling I get from all of this is that I am helping to salvage fossils from one of Britain’s best dinosaur fossil sites right here on the south east coast before they are gone forever by constant erosion by the elements,” said Jamie, who plans to publish a book on fossils.

“Fossil hunters have made a huge contribution to science over centuries of collecting. If people like myself didn’t bother to collect them when they are exposed, then they would certainly be lost forever.”