Cold ,wet,wild and windy here in Mullion today , so I thought I.d have a sort through the bag of bits and pieces that I, d picked up on Charmouth Beach a couple of weeks ago.
Not much this time as you can see and some of it was so covered in thick shale mud , that I thought I,d just tip it all out and let the rain wash it off . Tiny ammonites pieces of belemnites, the bits of old terracotta pots ,which I gather and smash to go around my pots of cacti. ..a couple of ammonites in the harder shale , which I,ll give to my grandson .
Good to get him interested .
.....and then I remembered seeing this sticking out of the mud flows about a third of the way up the beach in the top photo . I remember thinking " that looks like bone ". I tried to wash off the shale mud in the sea , but Shale mud is the thickest stickiest grey clay like mud....you dont want to step into it or you will be stuck fast ...which is why fossils are so well preserved here ....in another few thousand years , people will come and find fossilized wellies and feet !
So back home ,after two weeks of heavy rain the shale still has not washed off !
I had to scrape it off and then brush off the rest with an old nail brush ........
.....and ...do you know what ? !.......I think that it might just be bone !
I have found lots of vertebrae here ichthyosaur and one huge plesiosaur vertebrae, but this I will need some help in identifying .
Very excited ! I will take it to the museum in Lyme Regis next time we are there....or maybe someone can identify it for me on here ?
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