Day 2 - Thursday

Arriving on site and seeing the huge pile of nodules waiting to be cleaned, split and recorded is a little daunting, though this is tempered by the excitement of waiting to see what we might find. We crack on immediately (if you’ll forgive the pun) – hauling stone nodules off the site and piling them up to be cleaned and split whilst other members of the team supervise the digger and pile up yet more freshly excavated nodules and lumps of stone to be dealt with.

Rock Splitting

Fossiliferous Limestone

Emily has brought a professor from the Open University with her today – an expert in sedimentology and stratigraphy and they spend much of the day recording information about the different layers in the excavated exposure. Emily also records the first insect finds from the site – a tiny beetle, sadly it’s missing its head so we’re unable to establish if it’s John, Paul, George or Ringo!

We discover today that in addition to the nodules there are flatter lumps of laminated stone which split much more easily and seem more likely to contain what we’re now calling ‘miscellaneous fish debris’ – tiny accumulations of material which will be better understood when we can see it under a lens!

Todays finds include more ammonite impressions, some coprolites and excitingly, the first piece of something which could be ichthyosaur – Dean thinks it could be a piece of rostrum (jaw), though it’ll need closer examination to be sure. We also have the first find of a fish – a tiny little fish which for right now we’re affectionately calling a sardine!

Adam, the landowner, pops down a couple of times today to see what we’ve found and utters the quote which is sure to make the press release: ‘Sod the sardines, where’s my T-Rex!’

Sardine

Blog by Alexia Clark, Documentation & Collections Officer