MUSEUMS on Dorsets Jurassic Coast are set to benefit from a £200,000 lottery windfall.

The cash boost will support a joint project by 10 museums along the length of the World Heritage site that will focus on getting the best of the areas fossils on display locally.

Dorset County Museum, Portland Museum and Wareham Museum are among the centres that will benefit from the Heritage Lottery Fund grant to the Jurassic Life Intitiative, which bands together museums from Swanage all the way along the coast to Exeter.

The bid was put together by Dorset county museums adviser David Tucker and Jurassic Coast earth science manager Richard Edmonds, who liaised between the various museums.

Mr Tucker said: "Obviously we are very, very pleased. The idea is to purchase fossils for the museums along the coast and we are looking to get some really exceptional stuff.

"It is a large project looking to put some superb specimens in a handful of museums and some of the smaller ones will also get something out of it.

"You cannot see many of the fossils that are found actually on the coast, most of the big stuff is all in museums elsewhere in the country.

"This will have huge benefits for local people. It will be really impressive if you can go out to the beach on Lyme Regis or Charmouth and then go into one of the museums and see something thats been taken out of the cliff there."

Director of Dorset County Museum Judy Lindsay said: "We are absolutely delighted, we put together an initiative which we felt was really innovative because it wasn't just a single museum, it was a number of museums.

"This is going to be so great for museums all along the Jurassic Coast, it will really enable us to improve the specimens on show and tell the story of the Jurassic Coast."