Fossils

My interest in fossils was kindled by a lecture, part of a one-term geology course which I took during my first year at the University of Keele in Staffordshire, given by the professor of geology, F. Wolverson Cope. It was a superb, illustrated talk of an hour, and it was one factor which encouraged me to take geology as one of my joint honours subjects.

Over the years I built up a small collection of fossils, though it kept shrinking each time I taught the subject as I donated fossils to the various schools' collections. The fossils I still have are, more than anything else, as much reminders of a place as good specimens.

This is a brachiopod collected from the Great Oolite series in Gloucestershire - or, to be more precise, from a quarry near Gill's then home on the side of the drive leading down to Prinknash Abbey. It was collected while we were courting. Each time we walked past the quarry I would spend a few minutes looking in it - and it produced some fine specimens. This is one of the first I found, a brachiopod about 4cm long. I never did manage to identify its genus.

Dalmanites is a trilobite found in the Silurian Wenlock limestone, this one collected in one of the quarries along Wenlock Edge in Shropshire. I spent hours carefully picking away at the limestone matrix using dental tools to expose the trilobite's cephalon (head) with its multi-lensed eye. It's also interesting as the cephalon seems to be breaking up along 'sutures' - so this may be an animal moulting its outer shell, which trilobites did just like today's crabs and lobsters.

The ammonite Promicroceras comes from the Liassic clays along the coast below Charmouth in Dorset. This is small, only about 2cm across, but it reminds me of the holidays we took in that county and the many school field trips I led to the Dorset coast.

This is a superb specimen of the ammonite Hoplites, about 3cm across, from the Gault Clay in the cliffs near Folkestone. The whitish material to the left is the remains of the original mother-of-pearl shell while the rest of it, formed of iron pyrites, is an internal cast. Look carefully and pale lines can be seen writhing across this cast: they are where the septa, which divided the interior of the shell into chambers, met the outer shall.

This is Neptunea contraria, a gastropod from the Red Crag in the cliffs at Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex. Our family used to go there when we lived in Essex to collect sharks' teeth washed out of the underlying London Clay. The Red Crag is less than a million years old but the shell is interesting because, unlike most snails, its spiral coils dextrally - hence the 'contraria'.

The first time we went on holiday to Ardnamurchan, for a week in 1994, it was partly so I could collect igneous rock specimens for the geology department I was setting up at The Plume School in Essex. The visit resulted in our moving to Kilchoan two years later. Over the years I discovered that, while Ardnamurchan was justifiably famous for its volcanic complex, it also has some magnificent fossils. This is a Jurassic Nautilus neatly eroded so one can see the way the interior of the shell is divided into chambers by the septa. It's the biggest Nautilus I have ever found.