Last Sunday, I took a break from the woods and went fossil hunting. The area I went to was Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex, which is about an hour away from where I live.
I’ve never been fossil hunting, but a friend who I went with has been a couple of times, so told me what to look for and roughly where to look.
At the top of the Naze, I was taken aback by the erosion of the cliff tops. Apparently, this is happening at a rate of 2 meters per year.
The Hanoverian Tower - or Naze Tower, was built as a sea mark in 1720 and was the forerunner to the popular lighthouses of a later era. This tower will follow the world war two pill boxes and fall onto the beach in 50 years time if the area isn’t protected soon.
The cliffs are made up of a complex mixture of different geologies. If you want more info go here for a detailed explanation, but briefly there are three layers: The top layer is sand and gravel from the Pleistocene epoch, a Red Crag formation from the Pliocene and the bottom layer, which is a strange black sticky clay called London Clay from the Eocene period.
We were looking for bivalve valves and gastropods in the Red crag and anything from Shark’s teeth to wood fossils at the foot of the cliffs in amongst the London clay and on the partly shingle beach front.
It wasn’t that far removed from tracking as I ended up on the damp shingle, on my hands and knees searching for micro signs and getting “tracked out” as I searched for unseen clues.
And this was the haul:
Firstly, 4 Shark teeth identified by the highly knowledgeable Nazeman himself, Mike Todd, who runs a small store as part of an education project. These teeth are from Striatolamia macrota (7 gilled sand-shark) from the Eocene period - 53.7 million years old. I know this exact detail because these were found on Mike’s table at the top of the Naze! In other words, I got them from him because I failed to find any myself!!
Next up is some fossilised twig preserved as iron pyrite. I found this myself!
The piece de resistance for me was finding this piece of flint. I found it right up against foot of the cliff, in a puddle of water running off the London clay. Even though I didn’t get a chance to show it to Mike, I’m more than 90% sure that this has been knapped. I went on Mike’s website and confirmed that Neolithic knapped flint has been found in the area in the form of hand-axes and blades.
Another pointer is the brown/bronze colour of the flint. I’ve knapped this sort of flint before with the legendary John Lord. It almost certainly comes from Grimes Graves Neolithic flint mine in Thetford, Norfolk, which isn’t a million miles away from where I found this.
The final confirmation will be to send a picture to Mike and see what he makes of it.
I have little doubt that I am the first human to touch this tool since the last user, possibly between 7,000 and 11,000 years ago. That fact makes this an incredibly special find for me, possibly more so than finding a much older shark’s tooth (if I had found one that is). It provides me with a strangely personal, physical link with the prehistoric past and it’s no wonder people get heavily involved in fossil hunting.
The full haul is shown in this picture with a one pound coin (2cms –0.8in dia) for scale. On the left is (I think) Coprolite (fossilised scat) and the item with a hole may well be a part of a fossilised sea-sponge. The rest are fossilised twigs. I think the white shells are quite modern and should really be discarded.
I thoroughly enjoyed the day and I will most certainly be going back in the near future to have another fossil hunt.
Thanks for the visit.
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