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Collecting fossils
 Where to look for fossils
Dave Martill's favourite fossil sites
Reporting fossil finds
Safety tips
Dave Martill's favourite fossil sites
Many of Britain's famous holiday seaside resorts are close to good fossil collecting areas, and provided that you are careful not to collect too close to a cliff, they are usually very safe. Fossils can often be picked up from the beach without having to do any hammering or digging. Here are a few of Dave Martill's favourite fossil sites that are close to popular seaside towns.
South coast
Lyme Regis, Dorset
A great place to find ammonites and other Jurassic shellfish, with luck you might find some ichthyosaur or plesiosaur bones.
Sandown Bay, Isle of Wight (east end near Yaverland car park)
A beautiful sandy beach with colourful cliffs behind it. Many Cretaceous fossils can be found in the coloured clays, and some shell fossils, including sea urchins, in the white chalk. You could find a dinosaur here if you are really lucky.
Folkestone, Kent
To the east of the town is a wild part of the beach with a series of gently sloping cliffs of grey clay, sandstone and chalk. The grey clay is called the Gault and it is about 100 million years old, from the middle of the Cretaceous period. Fossils in the Gault Clay are well preserved, and sometimes the ammonites still show their original mother of pearl colours. The insides of the shells have often been filled with iron pyrite, which makes them heavy for their size. This makes finding them easy, because the fossils are concentrated by the tides and winnowed into pockets around large blocks of sandstone that lie on the beach.
Isle of Sheppey, Kent
This is a great place for finding sharks' teeth that have been washed out of the silty clays of the Eocene London Clay formation. You can also find pyritised plant fossils here, including fossil fruit. There are two places to look. There is a small shingle beach, where sifting through the pebbles will often reveal sharks' teeth. There is also a strand line of pyrite. This is a good place for finding fossil seeds and fruits. When the tide goes out there is a flat area of slippery clay. Sometimes this clay has hard lumps of rock called nodules, containing bones of crocodiles, turtles and birds; it also contains crabs and lobsters.
Do not look for fossils in the cliffs here as they are very dangerous because the clay is always slipping down, especially after heavy rains.
Barton on Sea, Hampshire
This is a great place to find Eocene fossils from the Barton Clay. Sharks' teeth can be found on the beach, and hundreds of different types of shells can be found in the clay cliffs. The cliffs are not steep here, but they can be dangerous in the winter. It is possible to get stuck in a mudslide, so great care is needed.
East England
Walton on the Naze, Essex
Just to the north of this sleepy seaside town is a low cliff of Pleistocene sands (just two million years old) called the Red Crag. This sits on top of London Clay (50 million years old) and it is full of fossil shells. The London Clay yields sharks' teeth, but it is best to search for these on the beach. The locality is also famous for fossil birds, but the chances of finding one are slim.
Hunstanton, Norfolk
To the east of the town is a wonderfully coloured cliff of yellow-brown sandstone, bright red limestone and pure white chalk. Dating from the Cretaceous period, the red limestone and the white chalk have lots of fossils in them, including brachiopods, ammonites and bivalves. Sea urchins can be found in the chalk.
Scarborough, Yorkshire
There are lots of places on the coast, both north and south of Scarborough, that are rich in fossils. The rocks here were deposited during the middle Jurassic in a series of river estuaries. At the north end of Scarborough's North Bay it is possible to find fossil leaves of ginkgo trees. Further up the coast there are dinosaur footprints, but don't try to collect these, as it is much better to leave them there for others to enjoy.
Whitby, Yorkshire
The coast around Whitby is one of the best places for finding fossils in the north east of England. The cliffs to the south of Whitby as far as Robin Hood's Bay are made of Lower Jurassic clays, with some Middle Jurassic sandstones on top, and – as at Scarborough – the Middle Jurassic sandstones have fossil plants in them. But it is the clays that are the most exciting as they contain ammonites, belemnites, bivalves, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and crocodiles, although the last three are rare. You may also be lucky enough to find some Whitby jet, which is a very hard form of fossil wood and can be used to make jewellery.
Scremerston, Northumberland
The coast to the north of Newcastle upon Tyne is made up mostly of Carboniferous rocks around 350 million years old. There are many different rock types to be found, including some volcanic rocks. The sandstones and some thin coal seams yield fossil plants, but at Scremerston there are some thin limestones and clays that are marine, and these are full of crinoids (sea lilies) and brachiopods.
South west England
The rocks in Devon and Cornwall are not generally as fossiliferous (fossil-rich) as those in the east of England. Cornwall is particularly poor in fossils because many of the rocks were produced by volcanic activity deep in the Earth's crust. Those rocks that were formed in the ancient seas were later changed (metamorphosed) as a result of the heat and pressure caused by all the volcanic activity. But where Cornwall misses out on fossils, it is excellent for beautiful minerals.
The coastline of Devon does have some fossiliferous localities, especially on Devon's south coast around Torbay. Here there are limestones of Devonian age (the period was first named after this county, and is about 400 million years old) that contain beautiful fossil corals. It is not easy to get them out of the rocks, but pebbles on the beach often have nice examples in them that have been polished smooth by the waves. Somerset and the Mendips region is much better for fossils.
Watchet and Weston-super-Mare, Somerset
The coastline here has rocks of the latest Triassic and earliest Jurassic age and all are fossiliferous. The Jurassic Clays contain abundant ammonites and many examples of the bivalve Gryphaea, also called the 'Devil's toenail' are common on the beach. Fossils are rarer in the Triassic rocks, and are non-existent in the red clays, so don't waste time searching in those.
Aust, Avon
The little village of Aust is situated on the banks of the river Severn where the M4 motorway crosses the river. When the tide is out it is possible to walk all the way up to the big suspension bridge. Here there is a cliff with red clay and gypsum at the bottom, a greenish-grey clay and a black clay. This locality has become famous because the black clay has a bone bed at its base that is rich in sharks' teeth and bones from many animals, including lungfishes, ichthyosaurs and even dinosaurs, though the latter are very rare. Fin spines from hybodont sharks are also common here. Blocks of the bone bed can sometimes be found at the base of the cliff, having fallen down during the winter storms.
West England
The west coast of England is notoriously poor in fossils. This is because much of the coastline is made up of Triassic rocks, in which any fossils that may once have been there have been dissolved because of the porous nature of the sandstone, or the conditions that formed the sandstones were not conducive for fossil preservation in the first place. The Lake District region, however, although made up of very hard rocks, some of which are volcanic, does have fossils, and they can be found on the coast. The Carboniferous rocks at Whitehaven are particularly fossiliferous, and you may find fossil plants here.
Central England
Away from the coast, it is less easy to find places to find fossils, but a good place is the peak district of Derbyshire. Anywhere that the white Carboniferous limestones can be seen, such as at Dovedale, Matlock Bath, Buxton and especially around Castleton, it is possible to find crinoids, corals, brachiopods, goniatites and even small trilobites. There are hundreds of different sorts to be found, and some of the brachiopods can be very large.
Wales
There are many places where fossils are abundant in Wales, but most rocks that were formed before the Triassic are very hard, and it can be difficult to collect fossils from them. There are some excellent places where Jurassic fossils can be found on the coast west of Cardiff to Barry and Porthcawl. In north Wales, Carboniferous rocks at Llandudno are highly fossiliferous and contain brachiopods, crinoids, corals and occasionally trilobites.
For more information about where to find fossils in Wales you should visit the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. The museum has expert staff on hand, and they produce a number of books about palaeontology in Wales.
Scotland
Scotland is excellent for fossils, and the museums in Scotland are very supportive of fossil collectors. The Hunterian Museum in Glasgow or the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh are great places to start if you want to find out about Scottish fossils.
Some of the sites in Scotland are very sensitive, and fossils from them could be easily damaged if not collected properly. The fossil fish beds of the far north east and Orkney are prime examples. On the Isle of Skye, beautiful fossils can be found at Berreraig Bay, just north of Portree, but it is a very steep climb down hundreds of steps to get to the beach.
There are no fossils on the outer isles, and they are totally absent from many of the islands of the Inner Hebrides. North of Stirling, nearly all of the rocks have been so intensely deformed by heat and pressure that all of the fossils have been destroyed. The rocks are also a bit too old for fossils.
The Midland Valley of Scotland is by far the richest area for fossils and the coastlines of both Ayrshire and Fife have many good fossil sites.
Northern Ireland
There are many places in Ireland where fossils occur. Spectacular finds of giant Irish elk have been found in gravel pits and in some of the Irish peat excavations. Excellent examples can be seen in many museums in Ireland. There are Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks in Northern Ireland, but they are only exposed in a few places. Elsewhere they are covered by thick lava flows that formed when the Atlantic ocean began widening at a rapid rate during the Palaeocene epoch. A visit to the Ulster Museum in Belfast would be a good place to start, especially as its curator is one of the best-known palaeontologists.
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