07BEACHES

COLLECTING FOSSILS

Most people don’t happen to live near a desert region with good badlands exposures nearby. If you live in an area with a wetter climate and lots of vegetation, your fossil hunting options are more limited. When plants cover nearly every exposure, look for places where something cuts through the plants and soils and reveals the rock underneath. In much of the world, the roadcuts formed when highways are blasted through bedrock can be excellent places to collect. In areas near the sea, coastal cliffs and the beach below them are constantly eroded and scoured by the pounding of waves and the rush of the tides. If you walk on the beach during a very low tide (you can look up the tide tables online), you can find the treasures left by the ocean (fig. 7.1A).

Figure 7.1 ▲

(A) Calvert Cliffs, with (B) shell beds rich in Miocene molluscs. (Courtesy of S. Godfrey)

In some cases, the fossils are literally everywhere, and you only need to reach out and pick them up (fig. 7.1B). There are many examples of fossil shell beds that are almost solid fossil shells, so finding them is no problem—you just have decide what you want to collect and how much you want to carry (fig. 7.2A–C).

Figure 7.2 ▲

Collecting in the Lower Jurassic beds just west of Lyme Regis, on the Jurassic Coast of Dorset, England. (A) Exposures of the Lower Jurassic Lias beds of shale and limestone. (B) A large ammonite exposed in a boulder. (C) The bedrock surface exposed at low tide is full of eroded ammonites. (Photographs by the author)