A day spent fossil hunting - and a success!

Scouse said:
BTW how far along the coast is the from Hythe?

Hythe is just down the coast from Folkestone, probably only about three miles or so. It's quite a nice quaint little town, with an interesting crypt in the church containing the bones of people who died in the Black Death (and earlier) stacked up into a walk-in ossuary. Well worth a visit if you are in the area. Do you know the area, Scouse?


Here is another picture of a more typical find, a larger but fragmented ammonite, probably Hoplites. Broken lumps like this are what one normally finds, I believe I left this one on the beach for someone else to collect.

Ammonite_fragment.JPG
 
Burstsovenergy24 said:
Would you like to sleep here?

Yeah, I'd give it a shot, no problem. I used to be an archaeologist and have excavated Anglo-Saxon graves before, so they are just bones to me!I believe the occasional local scout group may have stayed in there to raise money for charity.

It's a small crypt, probably not much larger than a garage located under the parish church. The skulls of about 4000 people are stacked up in two masses, along with numerous leg and arm bones. The bodies date from about 900-1500AD though there is a concentration around the time of the Black Death (1349-50) when approximately 1/3 of the population of Britain succumbed to the disease and died. It is quite creepy, granted, and some of the skulls show quite a story. Some are, sadly, of children and some of the others are deformed. One can learn a lot about diet from examination of the teeth of these people. Interesting place.
 
It's no worse than some of the sites of the Anasazi in the Southwest and the bones with evidence of cannibalism.
I bet that Scout troupe had LOTS :shock: of junk food all night...
 
Well, I've now soaked the ammonite and nautilus fossils in water for a couple of weeks so as to remove the salts. If they were just left as they were without doing this the salts would slowly dissolve and disintegrate them, after a year or so all one would be left with would be rocky fluff. (Hard to describe and I've learned this from bitter experience). In addition, as the fossils are heavily pyritised I have given them a coat of satin varnish which helps prevent oxygen from reaching the shell and accelerating decay.

Finally, I have made up protective boxes with an explanatory label containing the species type, age and location and they are ready to be added to the collection. Methinks I'm going to need a bigger house soon!

AmmonitesCleaned.JPG




Ammonite_Collection1.JPG
 
Melissa said:
Are there tours of the museum?

What is in the jar just behind the drawers? Is that a beak? Beaks?

Thanks everyone for the kind words! I'm afraid I did not find all of those specimens, (a few were excavated on e-bay) but to my mind finding a small inferior specimen is still much more exciting than buying a stunner. This may sound strange but in my opinion one has a personal connection with things you find, whether they be a fossil, an ancient piece of pottery, an old coin, shrapnel or whatever. I don't mean that in a hippy sense, but in the sense that you are the first person to ever see that fossil, or the first person to see and touch an old coin since it was dropped. It's hard to explain unless you have actually done this yourself....

Melissa said:
Are there tours of the museum?

Sure pop on by...it would be nice to show some of this stuff to anyone interested. None of this stuff is museum quality but I like these things purely because they are interesting!

Melissa said:
What is in the jar just behind the drawers? Is that a beak? Beaks?

Could be....'tis a secret!!!!! It's actually a jar of picked onions. I had a salad for tea tonight and failed to clear my table up before taking the picture. :heee:

I've got a drawer full of trilobites, Cambrian weirdness, echinoderms, eurypterid fragments, a couple of fossil fish, clay pipes and a small collection of WW2 militaria too...but I didn't think anyone would be interested in those. :? Alas, no type-specimens from the Beagle, I'm afraid and none of it is of any monetary value. Should I be admitting this in public?
 
I kinda wouldn't mind a closer look at some trilobites, Cambrian weirdness, echinoderms, eurypterid fragments, a couple of fossil fish, clay pipes and a small collection of WW2 militaria. Especially the first five of those.
 
Great collection Phil :biggrin2: My fossils sit in cardboard trays in the basement, probably got more dust on them now than when they were out in the desert.

I agree about finding your own, they may not be as nice as the ones in the Ebay formations, but the hunt to me is 99% of the fun. I got out on the desert this weekend, but couldnt quite get where I wanted to go (damn snow), almost got stuck in the mud, (why do they call it a desert?)didnt even get to look for fossils, but it was a great day anyway.
 
Phil said:
It's actually a jar of picked onions. I had a salad for tea tonight and failed to clear my table up before taking the picture.

Pickled Onions were a staple of the Ammonites. In fact, current research shows they couldn't have survived the Jurassic without them. :grad:
 
Here is a close up of the cleaned up specimen of the ammonite Anahoplites, somewhat blurry in the photo above. It would have been coated in mother-of-pearl, a pity it has flaked off in this specimen.

Family: HOPLITIDAE
Subfamily: ANAHOPLITINAE
Species: Anahoplites planus
Measurement : Diameter 40mm
Albian Stage: Middle Albian (105 million years old)

download.php


(Thanks for the loan Mandy, if you read this!)
 

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