FossilHub – Page 5 – Fossiliam: Dr Liam Herringshaw

December 22, 2022

My ’22 Top Ten – 9. Jurassic Whitby

The 2023 Yorkshire Fossil Festival is coming to Whitby over the weekend of June 10th and 11th, so it seems fitting that most of my research is focussed on the geological history of the Whitby area. In October, we published a new subsurface record of the Pliensbachian-Toarcian, Lower Jurassic, of Yorkshire in the Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society. Nine...

Outreach/Research

December 21, 2022

My ’22 Top Ten – 10. Castleford coal creatures

I’ve been looking back over the year of 2022, deciding what my favourite fossily and earthy things were. I’ve ended up with ten highlights, so I’m going to work through them backwards, chronologically. Number 10 is the discovery I made last month that Henry Moore’s school in Castleford sits on a layer of fossilized sea creatures from Ukraine. After I...

Outreach

November 29, 2022

The Ukrainian water-god of the Castleford coal

I popped into Henry Moore’s alma mater last week, to talk to the Year 9 geography students about palaeontology and Geoscience for the Future. In preparing my talk, I was curious to know what rocks were beneath the school. On consulting the British Geological Survey map, I was unsurprised to learn that the bedrock was Carboniferous. This was Castleford, a...

#StratumYoung/Outreach/Teaching

October 29, 2022

Mile-deep mine-shaft shows Jurassic Whitby was stormy and stinky

A borehole drilled nearly a mile down into the rocks beneath Whitby, North Yorkshire, has provided scientists with an amazing new record of ancient climate change. It shows that – 182 million years ago – the Jurassic seas of North Yorkshire were stormy, stinky, and very unpleasant for sea-life.

Media/Research

August 21, 2022

Creatures of Curiosity

This summer’s man-made heatwave has provided us with the hottest temperatures seen in Britain for more than 120,000 years, returning North Yorkshire to a time when hippos wallowed in its rivers, elephants grazed its grasslands, and hyaena clans made their homes in its limestone caves. I will be exploring this revelation – and how it began with the discovery of...

Outreach/Teaching

August 8, 2022

The Yorkshire Fossil-Finder’s Guide

Fossils are the preserved remains of ancient life, and show how life on Earth has changed over time. Fossils can be found by anyone, of any age or experience, and fossil-finding can bring enormous pleasure. The scientific study of fossils is called palaeontology, and all people, of all ages and experience, can contribute to this science. Many parts of Yorkshire,...

Outreach/Teaching

July 22, 2022

Yorkshire Fossils Week 2022

With absolutely no county authority, and with no approval from Alan Bennett, Betty Boothroyd, or Judi Dench, I have declared the first week of August to be Yorkshire Fossils Week! If you want to join me in celebrating Yorkshire fossils, here’s the list of activities I’m involved with, or that I know about, so far: Monday August 1st (Yorkshire Day)...

Outreach/Teaching

June 10, 2022

Fossiliam’s Upcoming Events – 2022

Below are some of the events I’m involved with during the summer of 2022: Creatures of Curiosity – Nunnington Hall – Saturday July 16th to Sunday September 4th 2022. – I’ll be appearing there in person to run some fossil roadshows on the 23rd and 25th of August. Yorkshire Fossils Week – Monday 1st to Friday 5th of August. From...

Outreach/Teaching

April 17, 2022

Digging into Yarcomb Sand’oil

I realised Acomb must be vaguely scientifically interesting when I found it mentioned in Martin Lister‘s 1683 Royal Society paper “An ingenious proposal for a new sort of Maps of Countrys, together with Tables of Sands and Clays, such chiefly as are found in the North parts of England…” Lister’s idea was that rocks and sediments should be mapped, for...

Outreach/Research

March 19, 2022

Jurassic geology of Yons Nab, North Yorkshire

I was going through some papers in the loft and I came across a sedimentary log of Yons Nab, North Yorkshire, which I drew up in 2009 after visiting the site with Prof. Duncan McIlroy. As I’m never going to do anything with it, I thought I’d simply publish it here. If you’d like to explore the Middle and Upper...

Outreach/Research/Teaching