In the footsteps of Mary Anning!

I took off to Charmouth yesterday (Saturday) with Emma, a very good friend of mine, to go and walk in the footsteps of Mary Anning and look for some fossils.

It was a beautiful day and we took a very leisurely drive down, arriving in plenty of time for the talk and guided walk that was booked. I've never been to Charmouth before, been past it so many times, but never stopped off there. So glad that I have now and will definitely be going back again; and soon!

The talk at the Heritage Coastal Centre is very family orientated but no less interesting for that. After the talk it was down to the UNESCO World Heritage Site to see what we could find. Apparently most of the fossils on the beach at Charmouth are the result of a very large cliff fall in 1956.

After a slow start we were soon finding lots of bits of belemnites, a type of squid, that lived over 100 million years ago!

There is also and incredible amount of sea glass on the beach there as well.

As the time passed we started finding the odd bit of iron pyrites and more belemnites. I went up to the clay cliffs and found a beef stone, so called because it looks like a slice of steak, with an ammonite imprint on it.

Then Emma struck (fool's) gold, an iron pyrites ammonite.

After the guided part of our day was over we decided to move further up the beach to see what else we could find, it also gave me a chance to try out my new geology hammer :)

Definitely need to learn how to split rocks properly, but we made a couple of cracking (see what I did there) finds of crystal ammonites.

We also picked up several rocks to bring home and crack open at a later date.

After a fantastic day we headed back up off of the beach to grab a quick bite to eat and a couple of souvenirs before a very pleasant drive home.

A brilliant day out in awesome company and getting to find and hold objects that were between 100 to 200 million years old is actually very mind blowing!