Robin Hood's Bay

Here is a little something that I found on the beach at Robin Hood's Bay, just south of Whitby. No idea what it is or even which way up it goes. I am pretty sure its Jurassic from the location but no idea if it was animal or plant. I'm not even sure if the fossil is a cast of something missing or a cast of something that was there. If you get my drift.

Personally I would venture a guess at plant. I think that the thing is upside down and that the striations in the empty conical tubes are where something is missing. On one side there are the faint traces of the other side of this shape, which I believe might be root or rhizome. Just guess however.

I see little point dwelling on it at the present time but perhaps someone will come back with an opinion.

The Trilobite's Lifeless Calcite Eyes

A piece of The Collector of Tales

.... That was more of less what happened when I tried to get a room sorted here. The only difference was that once we had got down to the issue, we haggled over the price. Well, that and the fact that I claimed that I was the mother of a smoking dog. Don’t ask me how. All I know is that I swallowed a couple of syllables in my translation of the word 'overnight accommodation’ and out it popped uninvited as it were. I have to say that this linguistic error was to my advantage however. It kind of caught her unawares and I think threw her out of focus on the price. Anyway five trupps was, I thought, a bargain even though there was the obligatory non-refundable deposit (for fumigation) which the hairy witch told me was set at another five trupps in these parts.

"On account of the calymeens." she had explained.

Then she had disappeared behind the bar for a few seconds before emerging with a look of triumph and a rather unhappy and pale looking creature about the size of her rather meaty hand and vaguely resembling a trilobite which she proceeded to crush on the bar before me.

“These calymeens! Hah!” she said and then grinned a gap-toothed grin.

Personally I think that she had kept that one there for the purpose. As the viscous juices of the hapless creature spread over sticky surface of the bar, I paid my ten trupps (and the shreeve tax – another trupp) and the key deposit (another two trupps but refundable if the key is presented on departure). Then with my bag, a huge key and my plate of smoke roasted and slightly warm pork on a dirty  birch-bark platter I made my way through the crowded room to the dark narrow opening with the words ‘Slepish!’ scrawled on the crumbling plaster above it in the hand of a large but moderately literate spider. The tankard of Horshp’s remained on the bar untouched. The dead trilobite watched me through its lifeless calcite eyes. 

Mass Extinction - Right Now! A Rant

I read some stuff earlier today about the 200 species or so of creatures that have disappeared from the UK country side in the past hundred years or so. Now if we think about the extinction of creatures like the Dodo and the Moa and the plight of white rhinos  and tigers, if we think about the demise of the thylocene (Tasmanian Wolf) and so on we could be  excused for thinking that we were facing a serious extinction event, sadly brought about  by humanity.

But that would be wrong, wouldn't it?

I know that we are doing some serious damage to the planet in terms of species dying out but I don't think we have  tipped the balance yet. A serious mass extinction event involves a lot of death. We haven't seen anything like it, not even in our best zombie apocalypse movies. In fact I don't think that we have  the intellect to imagine a mass extinction.

Take the Ordovician-Silurian event   (about 450 mya) which over a period  of about 1 million years wiped out something like 60% of all marine life. (Don't forget that most of known life was marine at that time). Shit, that's a a lot of death and all of this in critters that haven't even got a backbone.

Then again, there was the Devonian extinction (about 370 mya)  which killed off a lot of things over a number of different extinction events. If I seem a little vague it's because I'm not entirely sure from the record how many things were killed off. I think that it is reasonable to assume that much of it was marine still and that it was worse than the more famous K-T event that closed the book on most dinosauria.

The  Permian saw the biggest of them all according to fossil  record and academic view.Arguably, in this Great Dying, something like 96% of marine life and 70% of land vertebrates were killed off. That is a shed load of death. This all happened some 250 mya. Think about it. Only 4% of marine life survived. This is the event that saw the trilobites disappear for ever. It's like seeing the Great Barrier Reef turned into a marine desert - and I've never been there... Trilobites had been around in some form for about 250 million years. By comparison homo sapiens, us if you prefer, have been kicking our heels on the planet for about 2 million years.

Then the beginning of the Jurassic with 34% of marine genera disappearing. On land the dinosaurs survived and crocodiles...what is it with crocodiles because they are still around now?

But apparently large amphibians disappeared for ever. (How many large amphibians are you familiar with outside Japan and China)

Then there is the K-T. This is dinosaur bye-bye time. I'm not entirely sure what that really means because I'm not entirely sure where a dinosaur ends  and a  bird begins but what I do believe is that an asteroid smashing into the Yucatan peninsula some 65 mya opened up the world for the mammals and out of them came us. Not good if you are an Apatosaurus or anything else that a human , posthumously and with hindsight adds the appelation 'saurus' even if you know you are not a lizard!

Where does that leave us now. Well lets get back to the original premise.

Are we living in a mass extinction event right now?

Probably not.

But that is not to say that we will not move into such an event if we don't pay attention to the world that we are living in and abusing so badly. What would it take to kill off 95% of he world's animal life ( other than killing off an  appropriate percentage of the planets green plant life). Maybe a shift of 5C up or down in the planet's average temperature per ecosystem?

Most of our religions are ill equipped to deal with the issues because they are by definition  fundamentally humanocentric so that as we seek the afterlife, we give scant regard to the life of the world that follows us or the world that will follow humanity ( and / or mammals because we will probably all go together.)

That's enough for tonight. I will return.......

The Bone Bed

Only a specimen from a bone bed could be  this packed with different fossils. This sample comes from the Rhaetian Penarth bone bed at Aust Cliffs - that's the cliff face just underneath the old Severn Bridge (near Bristol if you don't live in the UK) on the English side.

The main fossil in here is a piece of vertebrae, possibly a marine reptile - I'd go for an ichthyosaur personally but that's no more scientific than that they were around at that time! However, it looks like vertebra - it appears to have a groove at the top and it is flattish or rather disk shaped as can be seen from the third picture ( that is the one I took just after I dropped the specimen on the  stone floor in the kitchen and it broke in half!). You can also see clearly the 'honeycomb' bone structure.

There are also a number of other fragments that are probably small coprolites -excrement - or possibly other bone fragments.

There are also a couple of small fish teeth visible and one can be seen in the fourth photo.

I'm not entirely sure what a bone bed is really other than that it appears to be an assembly of various bits of dead and now fossilised animals and excrement that are pretty broken up generally and with very few, if any reasonably complete specimens. This is all presumably the result of some natural catastrophe that has overwhelmed an ancient ecosystem and killed much of the living content - at leas in these cases the animal content.

The Rhaetian is the most recent  period of the Triassic period, about 200 mya. Here we are talking of the ascent (not the zenith ) of the dinosaurs and, possibly more exciting in one respect, a time when the earliest mammals appear in the fossil record. Astounding isn't it! Sadly (in at least one respect) , this bone bed appears to be marine or at least for those creatures living in water ( fresh or otherwise) and so we would not expect to find mammals here. However, I am not dismayed. I live near a location called Vallis Vale near Frome in Somerset (England).  This fascinating geological location is the site of the famous 'de la Beche' unconformity and I believe I am sure I have read somewhere is the location of an early mammalian fossil find.  However, I can find no evidence to support this online at present although I hope to  comment further on this in the future.

I really can't believe that I dropped the damned thing on the floor!

Now This Is A Big Oyster!

The oyster fossil was stuck fast in a crevice in the large slab of rock that had been exposed by the receding tide. I noticed it as I was running past and took a brief detour to satisfy my inquisitiveness. Everything around it smelled of salt and the sea, even this strange rock with its layer upon layer of skin. It was cold to the touch and it was still wet. The strong smell of seaweed was the only other smell that had the strength to rise above the salt. The slabs of cretaceous rock didn't have a smell of their own and in my two-tone world there was surprisingly little to distinguish the oyster from the other. Everything in shades of blue and yellow, everything salty and sea weedy. The tide was new out so there were few other smells, perhaps shellfish, maybe crab?

I touched the strange rock with its onion skin of growth, chipped here and there by the action of sea and stone and over-eager fossil hunter. Not my problem though. It wasn't alive and what was once within had rotted away too long ago for my keen abilities to detect. I sniffed it once more and barked at it but it didn't run away. See. Not alive. Not food. Not a toy. 

I left it there and headed back up the beach. A few million years more or less would make little difference to it, I might have guessed.

OK, so I got bored putting my point of view all the time and went for that of my dog, Gandalf... but I still don't know what this large oyster fossil is that I managed to prise out from the rocky crevices at the low tide mark on that Isle of Wight beach. The crime is that I can't remember which one.

The Devil's Toenail - Gryphaea obliquata

I would like to say that I found this at Lyme Regis or perhaps somewhere up near Robin Hoods Bay but alas I cannot. I actually bought this specimen in a second hand shop in Matlock Baths a number of years ago. It is probably Jurassic but as I don't know where it came from I cannot be sure. I suppose that it might have come from the National Stone Centre in Derbyshire but I don't know what rocks are exposed in the old quarries there and, given that it is an SSSI, fossil collecting is forbidden.

Gryphaea is an extinct genus of oysters that were around in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods and

are particularly abundant in the Lower Lias in the UK. They have been found at Lyme Regis since the time of Mary Anning, and probably before, but never by me. I guess that it is time that I went and had a look.

The specimen is about 52 mm in length. Of the two images, the first is without flash and the second is with.

A Mystery from Wren's Nest

A number of years ago - and I can't recall how many although it was after 31st October 2004 - I stopped off at Wren's Nest in Dudley (West Midlands) to have a look at the geology there. I have  on many occasions both before and since, hurried past on the M5 with the sight of this splendid piece of upended Silurian seabed  visible in the distance beyond the various advertising hoardings offering  sleeker, sexier and of course more environmentally friendly cars. Yet on this occasion, I simply turned left off the northern side of the M5 and headed for the hills.

It is an exciting place, in a sedate, peaceful and in some respects slightly eerie kind of way. I decided not to park my BMW Z4 (times were good then) in the empty car park on the main road below and chose to leave it on one of the road narrow roads running across the Nest to the small council estate beyond it. I then headed off along the narrow paths.

I spent quite a while wandering about up there feeling, I have to say a little uncomfortable at the apparent remoteness and lack of humans despite being in the middle of a large conurbation. I am a Londoner by birth and to my mind, empty places in cities are dangerous places to be in.

Still, I managed to find a spot on some kind of scree slope that caught the warm sun and I sat down  among the stones regardless of my suit, just to be there.  A casual inspection of the rock chippings that were extensive in the area  revealed a number of interesting finds. Some of these, I took away with me. Now whether this was right of me or not, I don't know. But there you have it.

Now the purpose of this rather extensive preamble is to introduce one of the most interesting fossils in my collection so far. It is Silurian - because it came from the Silurian limestones at Wren's Nest. That's basically all that I know.

It is obviously marine and from the look of it, it appears to have been soft bodied. It was also fairly flat and appears to have feet, spikes or cilia, presumably for movement. In certain light it seems to have an almost granular surface as though it is made up of many segments or perhaps more accurately, cells. These are particularly visible in the picture taken with a flash.(The greyer of the two images was taken with a flash. The other, without.) In shape it is roughly circular with a diameter of approximately 37 mm. Each of the cilia is slightly in excess of 1 mm. There seem to be about 6 cilia to 1 cm where visible around the circumference of the creature. I know of no comparable modern animal and I have seen nothing else like it in internet or documented records nor in any museums that I have visited. then again, I'm no expert so i suppose that someone out there will know.

Dalmanites - Trilobites from Much Wenlock

A number of years ago, I took a few moments - well about a couple of hours to be  precise - out of a busy working week to stop off and the Much Wenlock Museum's geology display with it's model of a Silurian Sea. Armed with a small booklet called Shropshire Geology: A Visitor's Guide (Paperback), I then went in search of trilobites  near a location called Upper Millichope Farm and found these two little beauties in the loose rocks in the bank of a small stream that ran along the roadside in that area.

These two images look pretty much like the Silurian trilobite, Dalmanites mycops and ,as it says in Shrophire Geology, it is  typically only the tail (technically pygidium). We have  the left side pleural region and the axis. Sadly there is no evidence of the slight spike, for want of a better word, at the end of the pygidium.

The second fossil from the same location looks, to my mind slightly different. Again it is only the pygidium but this time we have partial left and right pleural regions as well as axis. Again ,extensive damage, presumably by water erosion has removed part of the pygidium and there is no clarity at the base of the pygidium, which is a pity. I still maintain that the pygidium looks rounder than that of d. mycops and so I am tempted to suggest that this may be a different  species.

Coprolite!

Here are a couple of different coprolites that were found on Shanklin Beach this year. The actual find location was down past the pub below Shanklin Chine and they were located among the pebbles between low and high tide marks.

I don't know much  about coprolites other than that they are fossilised excrement and given that these were found in an area of Cretaceous rocks, it is possible that they are  dinosaur excrement.

The first of these is greyish and has he twisted convolutions that I understand are familiar to meat eating creatures. There are bits of things  in among it that could be small bones or teeth or even feathers.

 

The second is in a brownish matrix, is a more regular 'stone' shape and appears to contain lots of little bits and pieces of black matter that could also be bones. Other shapes are clearly bits of shells and there is one particular area where the serrated edge of a shell is visible.

Not that I am any expert is these matters but my assessment would be that the grey twisty one was deposited on land and came from a small meat or fish eating creature that lived on land.



The other, I would hazard a guess,  was deposited in the sea or a lagoon by a marine predator feeding on fish and shellfish.

One particular observation that I would make about the darker coprolite is that it has definite flat surfaces which appear consistent with something viscous sitting on a hard surface without the appearance of shear or other slicing. The image below shows some examples of this.

I wonder if there is any formula or rule that can be used to determine the size of the creature that dropped this from the diameter of the coprolite which on this one appears to be around 1.8 to 2.0 cms.

There, who would have  thought that shit could be  so interesting but then I guess you are what you eat!

A Couple of Cretaceous Oysters

My visit to the Isle of Wight in July this year resulted in this find. It is a couple of oyster shells, both fairly complete and stuck together in a fairly usual manner. Upper and lower shells are clearly visible on the lower specimen and they are infilled with sandstone.

The specimen was located  among the rocks exposed at low tide on the beach between Shanklin and Sandown, just below where the railway station of Lake sits near the cliff top. They were wedged in a crevice in the rocks. Total length of the fossil is about 150 cm and width 80 cm at maximum

So what is this Cretaceous Bivalve?

 This is a bi-valve that I found at Yaverland beach on the isle of Wight about 15 years ago. It had been washed out of the soft mud about 100 metres from the tea shop. The only problem is that I can't recall which layer I thought it came from.

Now I had assumed it was cretaceous and after seeing a similar specimen in the Oxford University Natural History Museum I thought it was called Sphera corrugata  or something similar and it was located in the Cretaceous display area. However, on a recent visit to the Museum I noticed that the specimen was no longer on display. A search of the internet has produced nothing of that name and my only reference book on the period, British Mesozoic Fossils, does not include it anywhere.


I would welcome any assistance in identifying this one.

Carboniferous Calamites

On a recent visit to Newcastle, I managed to make a visit to Seaton Sluice. This sadly named village has some interesting outcrops of carboniferous rocks as well as a rather quaint looking harbour which, I presume, is the basis for the word 'sluice'. There's also a pretty good fish and chip shop on the main road there but beware, the fish portions are enormous.

The fossil that I managed to find there is that of a couple of segments of a calamites stem from about 309 mya. Calamites are horsetails but unlike their modern counterparts, these were tree like and grew to around 30 metres. The stems of calamites, like their modern counterparts were hollow, rather like bamboo for example (unrelated). These hollow stems tended to fill with material to form , over the millions of years, casts of the inside of the plant. I believe that the fossil that I collected  is of this kind and shows the internal ribbing of the stem. There were a number of splendid fossils of the stems or possibly roots that were visible in the rocks and I have  included photographs of those as well as they look splendid and will probably be destroyed by wave action over the next several winters.

The first image is longitudinal showing the ribbing and the two segments. The second is transverse showing the infill and the vestiges of the outer layer on the far left.The third  is the reverse of the fossil and matrix showing additional stems.

The following images are taken from the rocks in situ and just below a walkway and steps. You can see fairly extensive stem, root or rhizomes in the matrix. Notice also that many of the  pieces are smooth rather than ribbed and  mostly do not appear to be segmented. You can also see the relative thickness of the stem wall in the third of this set of images (which sadly is a little out of focus).

These were all located in one outcrop and all within a metre of each other. In the short amount of time afforded to me (it was an hour from high tide and the waves were splashing up at my back) I didn't find any other similar fossils in the vicinity. perhaps a more leisurely search would have revealed better evidence

    

Cretaceous Ammonite

So what's unusual about an ammonite?  After all they seem to pop up everywhere and this doesn't even look like an ammonite!

This is (at least to me)  an unusual ammonite find from the Shanklin - Sandown area of the Isle of Wight. It was found on the high tide mark among the pebbles on the beach in early July 2014. Naively I thought it was some kind of dinosaur bone at first but this was dismissed with the kind assistance of the folk at the Sandown Museum.

 

In fact it is the cast of an reasonably large ammonite chamber. The creature died between 116 and 133 mya (Lower Cretaceous - Aptian to Barremian)

In life it would have swum about like a modern day nautilus and from the outside would have  looked like a larger version of the ammonites that will appear on other posts shortly.

Once it had died it would have fallen to the sea floor where the contents of its shell would have rotted as the remains of the creature lay on its side. Sand would have  covered the shell and would have seeped into the chambers within. The  ammonite would have been eroded by the sea  on its upper surface, which presumably explains some of the asymmetry of the fossil, until it is fully covered by sand. After millions of years the shell would probbaly remain in place until it fell out of the cliffs or was exposed by wave action on the foreshore. Once this happens the shell would disintegrate and the hardened inner chamber infills then separate. One of these is what I found on the shoreline between Shanklin and Sandown.

The  rock apparantly comes from the Ferruginous Sands that make up the tall cliffs that run along Sandown Bay to Shanklin and on which at one point the Isle of Wight Railway runs, it seems from the sound  of the passing train as it echoes at the foot of the cliffs below, perilously close to the edge near Lake.

What I find particularly interesting about it are the various notches in it that were presumably for ligaments or vessels of some kind. There are quite a few on what I take to be  the inner surface and fewer on the outer, including a single central one in the middle of the outer surface.

I owe the background and explanation of this fossil to Trevor Price , the Community Learning Officer of the Dinosaur isle Museum and I hope that he won't mind me mentioning him here.