Fossil hunting in Lyme Regis

Lyme Regis is a beautiful town on the coast of Dorset in southern England. Featuring prominently in the the works of Jane Austen and John Fowles, Lyme Regis is perhaps best known for its paleontological association.

We’ve read several books about the British fossil collector, Mary Anning, whose work in the early 19th century contributed to the modern understanding of extinction and geological timescales. Her important finds included an icthysaur, a plesiosaur, and a pterosaur and she was very well respected in scholarly circles despite her gender and lack of formal education. She is also, possibly, the inspiration of the well-known tongue-twister:

She sells sea shells by the sea shore.

While we ate a picnic lunch on the beach, the kids collected many of the amazing stones that they found on the shore. I imagine that small grains of sand are all this uniquely beautiful if you could see them up close. Each stone was different; some bright, some patterned, some with shells embedded inside. It was easy to see why they were so fascinated.

We then wandered around the town, did a bit of shopping in one of those stores that Molly describes as “dangerous”, visited the Lyme Regis museum, bought some rock hammers, and finally ate some ice cream.

The coast near Lyme Regis is very beautiful and we enjoyed searching the shoreline for fossils.

After we’d walked a bit away from the town center, we began to find more a number of interesting fossils. There were several areas where large ammonites like this were preserved.

We eventually came to these cliffs, which I imagine are loaded with fossils. You can really visualize the layers in the sediments here. Fossil collecting is prohibited in the cliffs; besides it is fairly dangerous since rock falls can happen at any time.

It was fun to bang at the rocks with the hammers.

But we really started to find an abundance of specimens just past the cliffs where a large ongoing landslide has brought lots of material down to the water.

Most of the fossils we found were small ammonites, which are spiral-shaped shelled creatures that are reminiscent of the modern nautilus, but are actually more closely related to squid and octopi.

River and Sage were both inspired by this trip.  When we got home late on Sunday night, River asked me if I would read to her (we’ve been reading “Awesome Archaeology“) and if she could get fossils for Christmas.  The next day, they both spent quite a bit of time arranging their finds into displays on the collection table.  Each display is sorted generally by the type of rock or fossil and marked with color-coded labels indicating the date and location of the discovery.

Overall, it was a very interesting trip.  We’re considering returning to the area again sometime as well as checking out some other fossil collecting sites nearby.