Tag: fossils

May 12, 2023

What is the Yorkshire Fossil Festival?

What is the Yorkshire Fossil Festival? Only northern England’s biggest annual celebration of fossils, friends, and fun!

Categories Outreach

March 5, 2023

Redcar Rocks, responsibly

Last month, I led a #FossilFriday event at Redcar Palace, taking people out onto the beach to hunt for fossils in the shingle, and bringing the specimens back to the Palace to discuss, describe, and draw. It was a fantastic day, and we’re going to do it again soon. I am now telling anyone who’ll listen that Redcar is a...

Categories Outreach

January 14, 2023

Embrace the grey fear

Wild winter walks on the north-east coast of England? Absolutely! I parked at the western end of Redcar beach. Majuba, it was windy! Coatham’s sand dunes were frantically migrating south. The offshore wind turbines looked certain to take off. Those small-dog-walkers who’d foolishly unleashed their hounds watched them saltate off to Saltburn. The sun was shining, though, and perhaps all...

Categories #StratumYoung/Outreach/Teaching

January 1, 2023

My ’22 Top Ten – 11. Crocodile Rock

“Is it a skull?” we asked, disbelievingly. “A crocodile, perhaps?”

Categories Outreach/Research

December 26, 2022

My ’22 Top Ten – 6. The Family Tree

In July, I went to Clayton St John Primary School in Bradford, to run a Yorkshire Fossils class. This was part of my Stratum Young project, supported by the Geoscience Communications Fund of the Yorkshire Geological Society, and it was lovely to go in and work with the children to discuss, describe and draw the fossils they can find in...

Categories #StratumYoung/Outreach/Teaching

December 24, 2022

My ’22 Top Ten – 7. Creatures of Curiosity

I don’t really need to re-write the post I put up in August, but one of my highlights of the summer was being palaeontological consultant and fossil roadshow host for Rosie Barrett‘s Creatures of Curiosity exhibition at Nunnington Hall. Rosie tells me that more than 20,500 people visited the exhibition. I made a video, which is rubbish, but gives you...

Categories Outreach

December 23, 2022

My ’22 Top Ten – 8. Yorkshire Fossil Festival

At some point I should probably write a proper blogpost about how marvellous the 2022 Yorkshire Fossil Festival, which I organized in Scarborough over the weekend of September 16th to 18th, was. Now is not that point. Instead, I will refer you to the image above; the fact that we won an award for excellence in geological education from the...

Categories Outreach

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...

Categories 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...

Categories Outreach

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.

Categories Media/Research