Fossils from Hastings

[Richard]

has anyone found any fossils in Hastings recently?
the best place is said to be in Fairlight, Pett Level beach.
there are supposed to be crocodile teeth and small pieces or dinosaur bone or casts of their footprints to be seen if you are lucky_ _ _.
8|



Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

[Richard]

Evidence of the following Dinosaurs are found in Hastings

1. The plant-eating (herbivorous) Iguanadon (fossil bones found at Shornden Quarry = Wadhurst Clay)
2. The fast-moving (carnivorous) meat-eater called Baryonyx, standing on two powerful hind legs (specimens have been discovered in the Hastings Beds Group and in the Wessex Formation of the Isle of Wight).

here is a general link:
http://www.discoveringfossils.co.uk/has ... ossils.htm

Iguanodon skeletons were found while digging in the ground during erection of the Gas Works in Queens Road in 1848.
These dinosaurs are at least 125 million years of age (lower Cretaceous) and known to be of the same creature as those skeletal remains found in Maidstone in 1834 and exhibited at the Natural History Museum, London.

In 1849 the following was reported by The Hastings and St. Leonards News:
"We hear that some fossil remains of the old-world Iguanodon have been found by the excavators of the new railway line near St. Leonards."
Remains of Saurians (the giant long-necked dinosaurs) have been found in the neighbourhood of Hastings. The skeleton of a gigantic Iguanodon was discovered in digging the foundation for the new house at Tivoli, called Silverlands.
In 1925, during excavations for the building of the 'White Rock Pavilion' fragmentary saurian bones were exposed in the Wadhurst Clay.
Some bone fossils were variously found at the following locations:
Hollington Quarry, Buckshole Quarry, Hole Farm Quarry and West Marina Quarry were also identified (by Dawson and Beckles) as yielding dinosaur bones in the Hastings area.

To put these million years ago into perspective it was during the geological division of time called the Cretaceous (Chalk-period) when the dinosaurs reached their peak - from 145 to 66 million years ago.

The stratigraphic terminology of the Wealden is complex and rarely explained clearly, the mainland Wealden consists of the Hastings Beds Group and Weald Clay Group, and both of these units are subdivided into formations.
Several distinguished Victorian collectors are particularly associated with the Wealden, including Gideon Mantell (1790-1852), Samuel Beckles (1814-1890) and George Bax Holmes (1803-1887), and many of the fossils collected by these men are still key specimens in terms of what they tell us about the respective taxa.








Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

[Herring_Gull]

There are loads more 'fossils' in Eastbourne.

The omnivore oxygen stealer variety.

[Richard]

_ _ _. no dinosaurs at Eastbourne

but plenty of fossils in the Chlak such as echinoids and gastropods with conspicuous flint bands formed from sponge spicules under massive compressive forces.
The flint was very useful to fashion stone tools in prehistory for killing animals and preparing skins and starting fires.
The white part of the Chalk itself being composed of countless marine algae microfossils called cocolith's.
Coccoliths are extremely useful in dating marine rocks worldwide as they are easily identified under the microscope, evolve rapidly and have widespread geographical distribution.



Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.