The holiday season is upon us. For some it’s a time to relax but if you’re in the tourism business then summer means hard work. That’s not such a problem when work means more time out in the open air on the glorious Yorkshire coast. As soon as the Scottish schools broke up Hidden Horizons started their programme of fossil walks, rock-pooling, forest schools, astronomy and a host of other activities.
So last week I found myself at Cayton Bay with families from Kelso, Perth and Stirling all eager to find fossils. To be fair it didn’t look like a great evening out. When I left home at 5:30 pm there was a light drizzle which, by the time we met up at Cayton, had turned heavy and dreek. Undeterred we walked to the bay and – guess what – the rain stopped and, when we looked around, there was no-one else on the beach. A beautiful vast expanse of sand and pebbles all to ourselves – what a great feeling.
Once we got to work on a bank of pebbles we were soon finding fossil corals, crinoids and bivalves (ie mussel, clam and oyster shells). One fossil that’s often overlooked is the bullet-shaped belemnite. The fossil is the remains of the guard, the internal bony part of a squid-like animal. We found several at Cayton Bay. One in particular still had the phragmocone attached; this is the cone-shaped chamber at the blunt end of the bullet-shape. The creature lived within the phragmocone with its long tentacles extending outwards.
While they all have roughly the same form, belemnites come in a huge variety of sizes with slightly different shapes – long and thin, short and wide, slightly waisted, sharp ended and blunt ended. This matters hugely to specialists who use belemnites to age rocks, but for the beach walker it’s fun to spot the differences.
For information about summer fossil hunts visit: www.hiddenhorizons.co.uk