But he slowly inched himself free, dusted himself down, and got back on with what he loves doing: looking for fossils.

Because the 18-year-old doesn't relax by watching football, or reading, or watching telly.

No. He loves nothing better than setting off with a geological hammer, cold chisel, pen knife, brushes and specimen bags and hunting for the bones of creatures who walked the earth millions of years ago.

Jamie is known to some as the "Fossil Kid" – the recent finder of ultra-rare Plesiosaur bones, and much more besides. Falling into quicksand at disused quarries is what you might call an occupational hazard.

"For him, looking for fossils is as exciting as looking for gold," said his dad, Gary. But Jamie disagrees. "We went panning for gold once in a gorge in Vancouver, and found a lump of gold," he said.

"But even that wasn't as exciting as finding a really unusual fossil."

Jamie has a wealth of knowledge about all things fossilly, and wants to go to Portsmouth University to study science and palaeontology before heading for Montana, in the United States, where Tyrannosaurus Rex bones have been discovered.

And yet he's no geek – he's just like any other teenager, even down to his T-shirt, with its self deprecating logo 'Genius by birth, slacker by nature.'

"My friends either think my hobby is cool and interesting, or boring," he said. "But if I take them out with me and we find something they all love it, and say 'Can we come again, can we come again?'

"And as Friends has got a paleontologist as a central character, it makes it easy for people to understand what I do. When my friends tell their parents about me, they say 'You know, he's just like Ross from Friends.'"

Jamie's passion was sparked by finding a bird footprint in sediment rock on a Skegness beach at the tender age of four-and-a-half. "We took it to a museum in nearby Chapel St Leonards and discovered it was a 120-million-year-old Cretaceous bird track," he said.

"Since then I have spent thousands of hours looking for fossils everywhere from Warboys brick pits to ancient pine forests on the Isle of Wight."

He made the headlines when he discovered Plesiosaur fossils in Yaxley quarry last December, but stumbling over amazing remains is no surprise for him. He said: "I've lost count of how many fossils I've found over the years. The things I find the most of around Peterborough are marine reptiles, because 160 million years ago the city would have been a shallow tropical sea dotted with a few islands.

"I am most pleased to have found a new genus of shrimp, but ideally I'd love to discover a new species of dinosaur."

His hobby demands a lot of painstaking work, but that doesn't mean it doesn't get Jamie's blood racing, as danger is par for a palaeontologist's course.

As well as being sucked into a pockets of quickmud and quicksand he has also tumbled from a cliff.