The snow has thawed on my deck overlooking Discovery Bay on the Pacific coast of northwest Washington State and has revealed the two fossils which ‘live’ there – if that’s an acceptable term for creatures which died at least 120 million years ago. I collected them at Whale Chine on the south coast of the Isle of Wight and have evidently treasured them sufficiently to carry them half way round the world which is odd because I have managed to lose many far more important possessions in my travels.
One fossil is a seven inch long section of a ribbed spiral ammonite and the other a very large oyster, eight inches long by four deep. Its imposing name is Exogyra lattissima. I took it from an extensive fossil bed at the foot of Whale Chine cliffs, counting hundreds of intact specimens. In prior years entire ammonites measuring several feet in diameter lay openly on this beach but they had all been removed long before my first visit. Good fossil specimens have value to private collectors as well as museums.
A chine is the name for a ravine cut by a watercourse through seaside cliffs. The name ‘Whale’ must recall some historic stranding of a cetacean animal or corpse. It is extremely narrow and deep. Public access to the beach is provided by the District Council in the form of a trail and several long sets of steps as sheer as ladders.
An ammonite weighing hundreds of pounds could only be removed from the beach below by sea and I had a boat and help capable of doing the job. I returned on foot several times hoping an intact monster relic might have been exposed from the constantly eroding cliffs but had no luck.
The fossil deposits on the Isle of Wight were formed in the Cretaceous period 145-125 million years ago in what is called the Wessex formation. At the time the area was located in the current latitude of North Africa and was a wide subtropical swampy valley stretching to Belgium.
Today its residue is covered by the water of the Solent which separates the Island from the mainland. It was roamed by dinosaurs, crocodiles and sea turtles. Not only was the land moved north by continental drift but a large section was turned through ninety degrees converting horizontal layers into vertical seams. Despite this geological turmoil the Wessex formation and the Isle of Wight are some of the richest fossil sources in Britain.
The Island’s many fossils were explored by the Reverend William Fox (1813-1881) who was Curate to the parish of Brighstone. He is immortalized in the suffix to the scientific names of four dinosaurs he discovered, including the small Hypsilophodon Foxii. According to his wife his enthusiasm for his hobby exceeded his attention to his duties. “It was always bones first, parish after”, she said.
On the north shore of the Island the exposed Oligocene deposits are far more recent dating back a mere 30-20 million years. The fossils there yield the remains of the many early mammals, often small and shrew-like, which would evolve to dominate the animal world.
My friend Richard Ford whose house in Yarmouth overlooked this shore spent his retirement sieving the Hamstead sands for minute teeth – only identifiable under a microscope. He told me he had sold a collection to a German museum for £30,000.
Later again, but still under a sub-tropical climate, large early mammals roamed the existing beach. To our great excitement, my ten year-old son Geoff and I found an eight foot long tusk of Palaeoloxodon antiquus, the first elephant, eroding from the clay soil outside Newtown harbor. It was in a delicate brittle condition so we gave it to the museum in Newport to receive urgent preservation.
Nearby were numerous skulls of Bos primogenus, the ancestor of modern cattle and a strange 6 inch long tooth. I took it to the Natural History Museum in London for identification and learned it belonged to a hippopotamus. I believe I was persuaded to give it to the national collection. I hope that’s a true memory for I cannot find it, if not it must be one of the treasures I have lost.
So the two little relics lying on my deck have a significance far beyond their unimpressive appearance. They remind me constantly of the vastness of time and the bewildering history of our planet’s annually repeated cruise around the sun. Daily concerns which occupy my mind are revealed as trivia of no account, yet none-the-less they inescapably dominate my every action, purpose and existence. It’s the price of living, of consciousness.
My fossil stories also remind me that there have been five mass extinctions on earth. Did you meet a dinosaur this morning? Their cataclysmic end when an asteroid slammed into the Yucatan 66 million years ago was not the end of life on earth. But what of us as we teeter on the edge of the sixth mass extinction? So long, Sapiens? Rulers of the Universe? Are we too blind and greedy to ensure our own survival …?
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A very good read!
Absolutely fascinating!