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!