Goal 36: Go Fossil Hunting

It was the best Sunday, and exactly the kind of thing I wanted to get from my Big Old To-Do List. I had an amazing time doing something I wouldn't have usually done and it made me a very happy little limpet.

And of course, there were a lot of limpets on the beach.

As promised last week, here's a photo dump of the fossil hunting part of my day.

Getting up early and getting the ferry to the Isle of Wight in gloomy weather:

Getting to the site (which was beautiful) and the sky slowly turning a gorgeous blue as we hunted along the beach for fossils.

Hundreds of fossilised little shells and bits of fish scale in these pebbles just lying along the beach. These were the most common type we found:

This type of rock is from a different layer, and has tiny bits of spine and other bones from prehistoric fish:

I also really enjoyed all the different layers in the cliffs, especially this pretty purple rock right at the bottom, which was a fine clay that crumbled very easily:

A section had fallen away, revealing some layers in clearer detail. An ice age river bed was less than half a meter from the top and you could see all the fossils inside it:

It turns out that flint is fossilised sponge, and this little guy had a cute seaweed hair-do.

Do these look like anything to you? Literal Iguanadon footprints!  The big one on the left even has a smaller footprint on top if you look closely. The National Trust had to make it illegal to take these from the beach as people kept stealing them all, but anything else you find you can keep.

And finally, here are all the fossils we picked up!

Loads of fossilised fish/shell rocks and some fossilised wood:

Fossilised sponges (flint), fossilised sponge fingers/lobster burrows, and some iron pyrite (fool's gold) which isn't a fossil but I spotted a lot of it:

Well, that's it! We also went to a monkey sanctuary and vineyard which I may post pictures of later, but the fossil hunt was the main event.

Limpet x