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!  

Day 8 of 8: The last day - already?!!?

It was hard to believe, at this point, that this trip was nearly over.  And while most of the time we had been looking for small marine invertebrates, we still noticed this large ... vertebrate?

The route we took passed through New Mexico's north eastern corner.  On that route were two more points of interest. 

 

Shelter is across the lake, to the right of center

The first was Clayton Lake State Park Dinosaur Tracks.  The park is a few miles north of Highway 87, then there's a nice stretch-your-legs walk to the site along a path and across the dam. 

In picture to the right, you can see the site's shelter across the lake.  To the left of the shelter is the exposed track site.

The interpretive signs were well-composed and helped to find some interesting ttacks, yielding interesting scenarios, such as a dinosaur's hesitation and a rippled, mud-cracked trackway.

It would be best to visit this site when the sun's angle casts more shadows, earlier or later in the day so the tracks are more visible.  At the time of our visit the sun was too high and bright.  Yet, since a boardwalk allowed you to see tracks from all sides, there was plenty to see.

 The second stop in New Mexico was Capulin Volcano National Monument.  I learned about cinder cone volcanos, and this was a perfect example of it.  There is a road that spirals around the cone to the top.  At the top, you have wonderfully panoramic views of the Raton-Clayton volcanic field, Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance, and portions of four states (New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Colorado).

Capulin Volcano



View from the top of Capulin Volcano

Thus ends the 2013 WIPS Texas trip.  I'm hoping to collect photos from participants of the fossils they found.  If I can, and they've been identified, I'll try to get them posted here.  If not, well, look for the next trip story!

Day 7 of 8: Two more Fossil-Hunting stops

We awoke in Mineral Wells with plans for another site near to the town.  While many of our group parted for other adventures, we still had 4 cars' worth of people.  North of town is a road cut in late Pennsylvanian strata.  There we sought and found calyxes of a type of stemless, free-floating crinoid.  Then we started finding all sorts of other types of marine fossils such as gastropods, horn corals, and clams.  (After the trip I've learned that Dennis compared finds from this location to those of the Mineral Wells Fossil Park and there was no overlap of species!)

While we were on hands and knees early this Friday morning, a local drove up and said she was off to her yoga class but if we were still going to be there in a couple of hours, she'd take us up on her property, the fence of which was up the slope over our heads.  We could not go without her as her dogs would not be happy.  She is Lucy, a Natural Dog Trainer.


We thanked her saying that we'd probably not be there that much longer and she left, presumably to attend her class.  It wasn't very long until Lucy returned saying she'd go to a later class so come on up because there should be lots more fossils on her property.  It was a lovely day and we scrambled up the slope, over a fence, and across to a gully. 




Lucy's pointing towards that gully

Down the gully we clambered.  There we found many pebbles, some pretty flowers, a shaly outcrop with some oysters and a few nautiloids.  It wasn't quite as rich as hoped but, Lucy explained, it hadn't rained in a while - usually there were lots more.

After this stop, another car's participants had other plans, so three headed west and north.  We had one more fossil-hunting potential for this trip, at an outcrop of lower Cretaceous strata.  This locality was a few miles north of a community called Fluvanna. 


There were plenty of echinoids - I've been calling them heart urchins but they might be of the Macraster genus.  There were some gastropods and ostrea.  The coolest finds, by the Langstons, are probably Salenia mexicana!

When we finally decided we'd made a complete pass over the outcrop, we headed on to stay the night in Amarillo.