Fossil Hunting in England's Jurassic - East side of Charmouth Bay, Dorset

Faux shark tooth

April 19 - Today it wasn't quantity that made the day; it was the piece of wood impersonating a shark tooth found in the Belemnite Marls Beds at low tide. 'Twas exciting until the geologist smirked.





We walked 5 minutes to the beach from our Hideaway, a very sweet 2 bedroom cottage decorated with nautical flavor in Charmouth, a delightfully tiny 2-pub village a few miles from Lyme Regis.  Normally we would be able to take the cliff walk between villages, but recent land slides have closed several portions of the hike.  Heading east from Charmouth Bay, we walked the beach perhaps a mile along the base of the 450' Stonebarrow cliff toward Seatown, where we were yesterday.


Barry in foreground at foot of Stonebarrow; Charmouth village in right center of photo under green hill;  Lyme Regis is just out of view around the bay to the left.  Black Ven area behind Charmouth is home of the largest landslide area in Europe.

Many amateur fossil hunters were spread out along the cliff, including children who were more interested in their new hammers than the rocks. 

[courtesy http://www.discoveringfossils.co.uk/]

Note the steep dip of the Belemnite Marl Member until it reaches the shore (dark area in the sea at right center), accessible at low tide where belemnites protrude from the surface.
Famous Golden Cap, the 650' hill in the far distance with the Cretaceous golden sand top is currently highly unstable, so most avoid that area.




This area is known for its pyritized ammonites, belemnites, brittle stars, gryphea, nautilus, and more rarely marine reptile and fish fossils such as Pholidophous and Dapedium.


Belemnite Marl Beds with Stonebarrow behind.

But we found slim pickings until reaching the belemnite beds, where said shark tooth waited for me in a shallow pool next to modern sea urchins (not found on Iowa farms).  The belemnite beds were worth the walk.

Two belemnites, each perhaps 3" long.

Typical belemnite guard size.

Something moved when I lifted a loose slab of limestone - note live worm ??

embedded in his burrow.

I am finding the various geologic layers difficult to distinguish; they all look like mud, mud, and more mud with some shale interwoven.  These layers are older than the Whitby Mudstones I'm more familiar with.

[courtesy http://www.discoveringfossils.co.uk/]

Our not-museum-quality cache for the day - pieces of ammonites, belemnites, and crab:



Charmouth ammonite embedded in cottage wall.

Fossil Hunting in England's Jurassic - the Jurassic Coast

April 18 - Lyme Regis, Seatown, and Charmouth, Dorset

We have arrived on the Jurassic Coast, England's only natural World Heritage Site, a total of 95 miles along the southern coast on the English Channel.

Our first stop - Lyme Regis, home of Mary Anning.



The entire town pays homage to her and to ammonites - they're everywhere: decorative street lights, embedded in the pavement, in stained glass and jewelry, stuffed animals, and for sale.



Mary Anning's home, now a museum

First on the agenda was to visit the museum built on the site of her humble home where her father and mother had a shop selling fish and fossils.  It is a stunning museum filled with fossils and historical documents:



Mary Anning's museum with portraits of relatives
and Lyme Regis dignitaries.




Mary Anning's book in which she wrote

poems, hymns, and extracts from writers

 such as Byron, giving insight into her

personal feelings.





Barry, deep in thought.

A letter from Mary Anning to

William Buckland telling him she

had found another Plesiosaurus

superior to the one purchased by

the Duke of Buckingham.


















William Buckland's table top made from coprolites!  His son Francis

writes, "It was often much admired by persons who had not the least

idea of what they were looking at."

Two fossil shops in town were chock full of ammonites, belemnites, brittle stars, and ichthyosaurs.

How about this one?

I think this one would look good in our house...

We then drove to Seatown, a small hamlet perhaps 6 miles east where we will do some scouting during the week, and then we backtracked a few miles west to Charmouth, another major Jurassic beach where we found our cottage ready for us a few hundred yards from the cliff edge and beach.  It's steak and potato pasty for tea, and then we'll check the tide times for tomorrow's first day of scouting the southern coast.

Fossil Hunting in England's Jurassic - on to the South of England

Sustenance in the form of English meat pies as
we left the Yorkshire Moors.

On April 17, we bid goodbye to Whitby and drove nearly the length of England to the southern coast in 7 hours.

















We spent the night in Donyatt in a pub/inn next to St. Mary's Church which was REBUILT in the 15th century!  The first church was recorded there in 1255.  Donyatt was the first stop on the train from London for the children sent to safety in the countryside during World War II.

Fossil Hunting in England's Jurassic - Whitby Museum



Whitby Crest (with Snakestones)

Today it was off to my favorite museum in the world.  On a hill overlooking beds of spring flowers and benches waiting in the sun is a museum straight out of the 1800's - the Whitby Museum.

Known for its fossil collections, particularly Lower and Middle Jurassic ammonites and marine reptiles mounted on the walls, I felt like William Smith or William Buckland could appear around the next display cabinet at any moment, though in actuality it might instead be Roger Osborne, author of "The Floating Egg: Episodes in the Making of Geology" who just happens to be the Curator of Geology at the museum.

Marine reptiles mounted on the wall; an Ichthyosaurus platyodon at top



The 12th century Whitby Abbey, which inspired Bram Stoker's
Dracula and present day gothic weekends and B&B's

Ammonites abound in Whitby and have done so for centuries (note ammonites gracing the Whitby crest above).  The great legend explaining the coiled fossil shape of ammonites relates to St. Hilda and the abbey, now a stunning ruin of the 12th century Benedictine structure.  Prior to that, in the late 600's AD, founding Abbess Hilda tired of all the snakes about the abbey and threw them off the cliff, thus explaining 'snakestones', as ammonites are called locally.

St. Hilda's Namesake

The first marine reptile fossils found on the Yorkshire shore were discovered in the 1800's when workers moved shale in their search for alum.  A 15' Plesiosaurus propinquus (now designated Rhomaleosaurus zetlandicus) was found in Kettleness in 1844.  Here are some photos of some of the exhibits:

 

Bivalves and Ammonites



Ammonite display;  many are holotypes



 

An exhibit of contents from Kirkdale Cave, our British Porcupine Cave counterpart, displays ice age fossils from an ice age hyena den, as explained by William Buckland, who upset the church by rejecting the Noah's flood explanation for hippos, etc., being found in Britain. 











The museum also has a fascinating display of polished jet including Victorian jewelry, chess boards, and a wide variety of decorative items.  The Jurassic sidewalk leading to the museum guides visitors through the biostratigraphy with embedded fossils, marine reptiles lurking, and living fossils planted at the appropriate time frame. 

This museum is a treat.

Fossil Hunting in England's Jurassic - Runswick Bay

Runswick Bay

Today (April 14) we drove a few miles north to another small village at Runswick Bay

There we found several small ammonite and bivalve (as yet unidentified) imprints in shale along the foreshore, a few of which are pyritized but are too small and black-on-black for a worthy photo.

Back in Whitby, local palaeobiologist Byron Blessed of Natural Wonders, Ltd., disappointed us.  Our jet black isn't.  It's just ho-hum petrified wood.  Local jewelers pay £100 ($150) per pound for jet.  Reimbursement for airfare was not to be.  Though recently, I'm told, some blokes worked 36 hours straight, hanging from ropes on cliffs near Runswick Bay, extracting 4 petrified trunks of jet from the cliffs in a top-secret operation.  I'm told they made off with £40,000 for their efforts.



Back to our flat and the small balcony to look over the goods. . .

. . . and then  off to the pub.









I asked Byron if he would guide me on a fossil field trip to either Port Mulgave or Kettleness, listed as difficult and very difficult in Dean Lomax's "Fossils of the Whitby Coast".  Byron looked me up and down, literally, and, using his axis vertebra, shook his head no.  Not only are these areas accessed by rope, but the recent storms have rendered the area unsafe.  Naturally, these are the "High frequency find" areas - the kind that yield marine reptile skulls.

Guess you gotta know the ropes.

Saltburn, further up the coast, shows off its fossil heritage.

Fossil Hunting in England's Jurassic - Saltwick Bay, Whitby

Greetings from Whitby, Yorkshire, home of the Dinosaur Coast and several bays granting access to both the North Sea and seaside cliffs full of Jurassic fossils.   We're finally saying goodbye to jet lag and a very welcome hello to jet black and the east coast of England.

Jet Black

Today (April 13) we went to Saltwick (pronounced 'salt tick') Bay 2 miles south of Whitby, with easy access to the sea and plentiful ammonites and belemnites.  We believe Barry found a fairly rare piece of jet black.  Bloody hell!  Jet black is petrified wood made from the extinct Araucariaceae tree, a relative of the living Monkey Puzzle tree, made fashionable when Queen Victoria made it into jewelry and wore it while in mourning for Prince Albert.  Whitby is the jet black capital of the world.


We hope one day WIPS members might consider a visit to this neck of the woods.  It really is another world and an incredible high when we sit on a rock, surrounded by seaweed, splitting shale to find a pyritized ammonite or belemnite waiting inside, or spy the rounded hint of an ammonite peeking out from a mass of boulders.

Barry above First Nab

This 'field trip' is not without its risks. January storms eroded up to seven years of cliff face within a few weeks along this coast, leaving the cliffs extremely unstable; some have been hurt recently by falling rocks from the saturated ground above, so we keep a good 4-5' distance from the base. 






We head out as the tide is going out (9:00 am this morning), which gives us time to scout around the Second Nab (rock jutting out of the water) and return to the safety of the beach area by the time high tide returns a few hours later.  Novices can get stranded facing an incoming sea and steep cliffs with no way out.  My Iowa farm upbringing didn't begin to prepare me for these water hazards.


The Middle and Lower Jurassic are exposed along the coast in the 200-600' cliffs, which are regularly eroded by storms and tides from the North Sea.  The base of the cliffs at Whitby and Saltwick Bay are Lower Jurassic.  About halfway up is the Dogger, a marker bed made of hard rock and hard nodules, and on top of that is the Middle Jurassic. 

The cliffs get older as we travel north.  Most of our finds come from the Whitby Mudstone Formation of the Lower Toarcian from the Lower Jurassic.  Unlike fossil collection in America, in the UK we can collect vertebrates.  If the site is an SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest), hammering isn't allowed.





Belemnite Guard

Whitby is a lovely fishing village on the Yorkshire coast, hosting the world's best ammonite museum, the home of alum, Captain Cook, Bram Stoker's "Dracula" setting at the local Abbey, various shipwrecks, and a very active fishing fleet setting out with lobster and crab cages, setting the sea gulls squawking. On our way over from the west coast, we lunched next to a 1719 fireplace, and today we walked past a 1609 fisherman's cottage and the 1401 Smugglers Pub.  What history!

After several treks with suitcases to our flat (with outstanding views overlooking red tile rooftops, Whitby Bay and the Abbey) up 44 steps, and the many uneven and steep steps up and down from cliffs to shore, Barry says even his pygidium aches, which we treat with a few pints at our new local, the Elsinore Pub.

View of Whitby Abbey across Whitby Bay from kitchen window

For more information of this fantastic Jurassic area, the best book is "Fossils of the Whitby Coast" by Dean Lomax, a WIPS member.  "The Floating Egg" by Roger Osborne, deals with this coastline.

For information on UK geology:   http://www.discoveringfossils.co.uk/locations.htm

We belong to UKAFH (UK Amateur Fossil Hunters).  Their newsletter, "Trilobite Times", is free, fun, with superb photos of their field trips collections.  Sadly we weren't able to meet up with them on this trip.  Check out their website:  http://www.ukafh.co.uk/

Cindy and Barry Smith

Fossil Hunting in England’s Jurassic - the beginning

Two of our members, Cindy and Barry Smith, are traveling this April to England.  Here begins their story:

Greetings from across the pond in Barry's childhood home, Grange-over-Sands, a tiny village in northwest England.  

Today [Apr. 7, 2014] we hiked in fresh drizzle and fog, through daffs, past sheep and over styles, to Hampsfell Hospice atop Carboniferous limestone featuring grykes, clints and runnels, the grykes sheltering fauna that grows nowhere else from the rabbits, sheep and cows.

For those who enjoy British geology:  
http://www.limestone-pavements.org.uk/documents/Grangeleafletlowres.pdf

Thursday [Apr. 10] we head west to our first of 3 Jurassic destinations, Whitby, a lovely fishing village on the Yorkshire coast, hosting the world's best ammonite museum, the home of alum, Captain Cook, Bram Stoker's "Dracula" setting at the local Abbey, various shipwrecks, and jet black (petrified wood made from the Araucariaceae tree, a relative of the Monkey Puzzle tree, made fashionable when Queen Victoria had it made into jewelry and wore it while in mourning for Prince Albert).  There we will have a few pints and collect ammonites, belemnites and, with luck, the odd marine reptile (!) between high tides from the cliffs and shores of the Upper and Lower Lias.

Our schedule:

4/10-17 Whitby on the North Sea, northeast coast of England

4/17-25 Charmouth near Lyme Regis on south coast

4/25-5/2  Castlemartin, Pembrokeshire, Wales, on the west coast

 
Tally ho!