Roll up for the Mystery Tour – Time to visit the Silurian

By | August 4th, 2007|Everything Dinosaur News and Updates, Geology, Main Page|0 Comments

Everything Dinosaur – Fossil Hunting Trip

With the weather in the UK finally improving (it has been the wettest June and July on record), we have the opportunity to go on a field trip to Shropshire looking for invertebrate fossils.  Today we are going to Ludlow, a small, market town in Shropshire.  Not to sure how far it is from the office, but we have plenty of provisions to keep us going.

We have yet to decide which area we are going to prospect, but a study of our geological maps of the Midlands shows the area around Mortimer forest to be a likely place.  We will pack our hand lenses, light hammers (although we do not encourage hammering away at rock faces or bedrock) and our eye goggles.  The area has Silurian sediments laid down when this part of England was a warm, tropical sea.  The Silurian epoch dates from approximately 443 mya to 417mya.  We are hoping to find bivalves, brachiopods, corals and perhaps even if we are lucky we may find some partial trilobites or some evidence of trilobite moulds (like crabs trilobites shed their exoskeleton when they wanted to grow).

Mike has organised the picnic (so expect lots of sweets then)!  Sue has been given the task of remembering the camera so we can take some pics.

Wish us luck.

For models and replicas of iconic fossil animals: Everything Dinosaur Learning Section – Replicas of Fossil Animals.