England Summer 2025, Day 10-part 2 Day 11-part 1

Ammonite socks!

Fossil hunting on the Jurassic Coast deserves its own post. Maybe this activity doesn’t mean as much to people who grew up in England as it does to someone who grew up in the middle of south Texas. I don’t know. For me, it’s a big freakin’ deal. The fossils people find at Lyme Regis (where we were) are between 250 and 65 million years old!

After we visited Mary Anning’s statue for a second time in the same day, we made our way to one of Lyme Regis’ beaches known for having fossils and rocks that have fossil imprints. Alongside our group from the museum, we walked down to the area called Black Ven (where Anning hunted) to look for rocks that might have ammonite and other fossil imprints or even tiny fossils.

If you need a quick recap on Mary Anning, take a look at this sign:

As you can see below, the rocky beach next to Black Ven abuts this steep cliff made out of shale. Shale is a sedimentary rock composed primarily of mud and clay, and it is known for its ability to be split into thin layers. You can probably see the layers of the cliff in the pics below. Imagine that within a particular rock on a small scale!

You can see Kensington and our guide among others hunting below. Notice how she has to walk on and between rocks. Notice how the guide and another hunter are squatting down to look for fossils. Imagine doing that all day, and you get an idea of what it might feel like to hunt for fossils.

One way to hunt for prehistoric goodies is to look for small fossils trapped in crevices between larger rocks and the beach. When I say small, I mean like the size of a pencil eraser or maybe the size of a small coin. Before we searched the beach, our guide and his assistant showed us some of these small fossils. See the image below. On the left is a crinoid star (it’s a small section of a small sea creature’s stem). On the right is a part of a belemnite.

I didn’t find any of these small fossils. It’s like looking for a few needles in a giant haystack. Lacy and Kensington found some goodies, though. I’m glad they found them. Below are pictures of a belemnite (top left), an ammonite (top right), a fish scale trapped in a rock (middle right), and what I think are sea lily impressions (bottom).

Another way to fossil hunt is to simply to look for rocks that clearly show fossils. Check out the ammonite on that huge rock on the left shown in the picture below. That rock is really like a small boulder. It’s a few feet long and wide and cannot be moved–so no one’s taking that one home!

But you can look for smaller versions of what you see above and you can look for rocks that might have fossils inside them and crack them open. Our guide did this to show us how that works, and Kensington got to be a part of it!

She enjoyed that! Here’s a video of it.

Although I felt defeated after not finding anything myself on our fossil walk, I was glad I went fossil hunting. Because I didn’t find any ammonites that day, I decided to drown my sorrows with a cider (yeah, I know I’m not supposed to drink, but hey).

We decided to give fossil hunting a try the next morning before we departed Lyme Regis to see if we had better luck without the group, and we thought there might not be as many people on the beach. There were only two people out there besides us, and by the time left we were the only people on the beach.

On the second day we spotted more ammonite imprints on big rocks.

I made some good finds, too. I ended up with a limestone rock with an ammonite fossil and two pieces of shale with ammonite imprints. Because of that, I allowed myself to buy the ammonite socks from the museum gift shop (pic shown at the beginning of this blog post).

Here are the pics I took in Lyme Regis of my finds:

Here are the pics I took once I got home (yes, they made it Maine!):

I found some other stuff on the beach, too. Our guide told us that people from the 19th century used to dump their trash out here. He said we might find pieces of pottery, glass, and other items. I found a few things I thought worth keeping. The picture at left below is a piece of pottery that I think looks like the shape of Maine. The picture on the right just happens to have MISTS in it. My name is Mist(y) and my middle initial is S. Hmm.

Yeah, it turned out to be ok. We all found something.

We also figured something out that we didn’t take into consideration the morning we went down to the beach. This might also explain why the beach wasn’t crowded. THE TIDE WAS COMING IN. FAST.

While we were on the beach we noticed the tide was coming in. But I was surprised by how quickly it came in. It was like one minute we had some water on the beach, and fifteen minutes later the water was almost up to the cliff near the stairs down to the beach! Farther away from the stairs the water didn’t seem so high, but Kensington acted quick to tell us we needed to get back. I honestly wasn’t too concerned. By the time we got back to the stairs we were wading through water! oops!