A courageous six-year-old Ruthin girl battling leukaemia had her wish come true when she got to walk with dinosaurs for a day.

After enduring months of intense chemotherapy, six-year-old Ysgol Gellifor pupil Catrin Kneale was given the chance to be a child again and line her room with treasured keepsakes when charity Make-A-Wish UK brought her dream of being a paleontologist to life.

Mum Liz Kneale, said: “In amongst everything that’s happened, this will be a really positive experience for her and something that she will remember, rather than all the hospital visits.

"We’re still talking about the wish now, and we’ve put up a display cabinet in Catrin’s room full of memories from her wish."

Before the dino-crazy Catrin fell ill with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in June 2016, her passion had been conducting fossil digs in the family's back garden, and learning everything about prehistoric creatures, which has now had to be put on hold.

Despite intense chemotherapy every ten days at Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool for sixth months, brave Catrin is still on a course of regular maintenance treatments until August this year, requiring both of her parents to stop working to care for her and baby sister Megan.

After a request to Make-A-Wish, "Wishgranter" Lucy Dowling began by arranging for a dinosaur expert in America to send Catrin a piece of a real T-Rex dinosaur bone.

Mrs Kneale said: “A parcel arrived for Catrin, all the way from Montana in America. Chris Organ, a dinosaur expert there had sent Catrin a piece of real T-Rex dinosaur bone! He wrote a lovely letter and sent fossilised leaves. We weren’t expecting anything like that and it was like Christmas had come early for Catrin.”

The family then travelled to the South Wales last November for Catrin's wish day, where they met Ben Evans from the British Institute for Geological Conservation, who took them to Cardiff for a behind-the-scenes tour of the National Museum of Wales' archives and a secret area of where 300 million year old fossilised spiders and 12 thousand year old mammoth remains are kept.

At a nearby beach Catrin then followed a trail fossilised dinosaur footsteps frozen in time in the rock, with Mr Evans helping her take a clay cast of one of prehistoric giant’s prints to bring home.

Further along the coast, Catrin and Megan were given their own goggles with a hammer and chisel and were shown how to excavate some of the thousands of fossils embedded in the cliff face.

Mrs Kneale added: “When Catrin was in treatment she didn’t have any weekend news to share at school, but after her wish, it’s so nice for her to talk about her special weekend with her class mates."