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Nicola Venning takes her children on a fossil-fuelled adventure in Dorset .
By Nicola Venning
It was hard to tell who was more impressed by the hard black stone – the fossil expert or my 11-year-old son. The dark conical shape turned out to be 200 million-year-old shark coprolite, or “pooh-stone” as my youngest gleefully pointed out.
We had gathered with about a dozen other adults and children, on a grey wintry morning on Black Venn. This pebbly beach is about a quarter of a mile east of Lyme Regis in Dorset and is the site of regular fossil walks organised by the Museum of Lyme Regis. Our guides were local geologists Paddy Howe and Chris Andrew.
As we splashed along the beach in our wellingtons, racing boats glided past on mill-pond-still Lyme Bay and the distant peak of Golden Cap glowed in the strengthening sun. It was, in short, a perfect morning to stroll along the Jurassic coast. However, we weren’t interested in the views of this Unesco World Heritage Site. Instead, we were staring hard at the ground, looking for fossils.
The stretch of coast from Lyme to Charmouth is between 195 and 205 million years old and was once a shallow tropical sea teeming with life. That life is now entombed in the muddy “marls” (silty clay) gradually being exposed in the Jurassic cliffs….Continue reading
