Walking with dinosaurs is something you can actually do in Yorkshire! The coastline around Scarborough is famous for its dinosaur trackways, so much so that Yorkshire coast has earned the nickname “The Dinosaur Coast”! You may recall early in 2023 a particularly large footprint was discovered at Burniston, north of Scarborough, with an iconic three toed outline suggesting this belonged to a large meat-eating dinosaur – something like a Megalosaurus! I say, something like, because you can never be completely certain when all you have is a footprint. Despite the abundance of trackways in Yorkshire only a handful of dinosaur bones have been discovered (many of them from inland sites!). Here at Fossils in t’ Hills we’re all about amazing yet underappreciated inland fossils and their stories, so let’s delve into the tale of the first dinosaur to be described by science and follow its trail to a beautiful fossil from Yorkshire! To tell the tale of Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur named by science, I first need to transport you to London, 200 years ago. It’s February 1824. You’re attending a lecture at the Geological Society. You’ve just been listening to a most riveting talk about a complete plesiosaur skeleton discovered by Mary Anning earlier that winter (which is now lodged in the downstairs rooms, too heavy to make it into the meeting room). For our next speaker we introduce the Reverend William Buckland, recently elected President of the Geological Society and lecturer at Oxford University. You may have met him before - two years earlier Buckland was up in Yorkshire exploring Kirkdale Cave and concluding that it was inhabited by hyenas! (you can check out our blog on this later). This time Buckland is here to speak of the “Great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield”. His talk takes us further back in time, to describe a series of bones excavated from a mine just outside Oxford at Stonesfield. Bones had been discovered there in the middle of the 18th Century from three ‘slate’ beds within an oolitic limestone. These huge bones were considered to have belonged to hippos or rhinos or other similar large modern mammals. Among the fossil bones was a piece of jaw with a single, recurved, and serrated tooth standing proud of the rest. Buckland recognized these teeth as belonging to something altogether more reptilian. From these bones and others he had seen Buckland describes a “…carnivorous creature of enormous magnitude…” Estimated to be up to 20 meters long and reconstructed as walking on all four limbs and amphibious - say hello to our first glimpse at Megalosaurus. This is obviously a world away from the gracile therapod walking on its two hind limbs that we know of today but as with many of these prehistoric creatures they will undergo numerous revisions and reimaginings between their discovery and the present. There is one word missing from Buckland’s presentation though - nowhere does he call his “Great Fossil Lizard” a dinosaur. Not once. Why? The word wouldn’t be invented for another 18 years! It would take the description of Iguanodon the following year (1825) and an ankylosaur called Hylaeosaurus (1832) and then ANOTHER ten years before “dinosaur” became a word! Let us now fast forward to 1842. We now must introduce Sir Richard Owen, later to become one of the driving forces behind the creation of the London Natural History Museum but at this point Hunterian Professor of Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons. If you take a dip into the history of palaeontology it won’t take you long to come across this character. Owen, a Lancastrian by birth, was generally regarded as a bit of miser (many of his Victorian-era colleagues might have called him a few other choice words at the time…). It is Owen, who in his Report on British Fossil Reptiles Part II describes how the features of the pelvic region, vertebrae, ribs, long bones, and their terrestrial lifestyle are: “…deemed sufficient ground[s] for establishing a distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles, for which I would propose the name of Dinosauria” And so the dinosaurs (Greek for 'terrible lizards') received their name at last! Now by this point you are probably thinking that this is all very interesting but how does inland Yorkshire fit in here? If you read Owen’s Report on British Fossil Reptiles you will find this extract: “ in some private collections in the town of Malton, Yorkshire, are teeth, unquestionably belonging to the same species as the Stonesfield Megalosaurus, from the oolite in the neighborhood of that town” Incredible as it seems, in the paper that first defines a dinosaur there is a reference to fossil dinosaur remains in Yorkshire – and not the famous trackways of the coast! So, what do we know about these teeth? Unfortunately, very little. Owen refers to several teeth but doesn’t include drawings. A tooth belonging to Megalosaurus is listed in several later 19th Century texts as having been found in a quarry at Slingsby (around 5 miles west of Malton) before entering the care of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society – this is the society that was behind the formation of the Yorkshire Museum in the Museum Gardens of York. Returning to 2024, let us now head to the Yorkshire Museum, and walk though the galleries, past mighty skeletons of marine reptiles and into a room with dinosaur footprints. There is a glass case with a single tooth, preserved on the edge of a block of oolite and with an old-fashioned paper label attached to the front that reads: “Tooth of the Megalosaurus presented by Dr Murray” The line below is a little harder to read, the ink having faded over the last century and a half, but I kind of hope it reads: “….the finest specimen of this kind known” This specimen was donated to the museum in 1869, so it isn’t entirely outside of the realms of possibility that in 1842 it was held in a private collection and is at least one of the specimens that Owen was referring to. The Slingsby tooth shows the slender, curved backwards shape with the serrated concaved edge that Buckland also describes from the Stonesfield specimen. Clearly this was an animal... “admirably adapted to the destructive office for which they were designed” There are a few things about the Slingsby specimen that need to be addressed. First, the specimen was found in the Coralline Oolite Formation, the exact horizon is not recorded, but this is an entirely marine sequence – so what’s a large meat-eating dinosaur doing there? Thinking has moved on since the early 19th Century and we no longer believe Megalosaurus to have been an amphibious reptile. What was more likely the case was this carnivore lived on one of the many islands that punctuated the shallow tropical sea that extended across much of Europe at the time. It was likely that the tooth was either lost through natural replacement processes, or the animal died and the body or bones were washed out to sea where they came to rest on the seafloor. The second issue is the age of these rocks. Although Buckland’s specimen was also collected from an oolite formation, it is not the same unit - indeed the Yorkshire specimen may be up to 14 million years younger than the Oxford specimen. Is this too long an interval for the two specimens to be the same species? The jury is out on that, but we can say with some certainty that the Slingsby tooth belongs to a Megalosaurid dinosaur, meaning if it isn’t Megalosaurus then it was closely related to it. Since 1824 Megalosaurus has undergone a few identity crises of its own. Not only has our interpretation of what the creature looked like changed considerably, but also the identification of the very bones themselves! From a more recent reassessment of the Stonesfield bones it would seem that there may be two different species present in the jumble and the only one with sufficient characteristics to really define a species from is that iconic jaw section so beautifully illustrated by Mary Morland. This Year marks the 200th anniversary of official announcement of Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur to be scientifically described (even if they didn’t know it was a dinosaur at the time…) – so why not celebrate the occasion by going to see Yorkshire’s very own ‘Megalosaurus’ fossil in the Yorkshire Museum! Author: Jed Atkinson References
Benson, R.B., Barrett, P.M., Powell, H.P. and Norman, D.B., 2008. The taxonomic status of Megalosaurus bucklandii (Dinosauria, Theropoda) from the Middle Jurassic of Oxfordshire, UK. Palaeontology, 51(2), pp.419-424. Boylan, P.J., 1984. William Buckland, 1784 - 1856: Scientific Institutions, Vertebrate Palaeontology, and Quaternary Geology. University of Leicester. Thesis. Buckland, W. 1824. Notice on the Megalosaurus or great fossil lizard of Stonesfield. Transactions of the Geological Society of London, 21, 390–397, pls 40–44. Buckland, W. 1836. Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology. Vol 2. William Pickering: London. Hudson, J.G., Romano, M., Lomax, D.R., Taylor, R. and Woods, M., 2023. A new giant theropod dinosaur track from the Middle Jurassic of the Cleveland Basin, Yorkshire, UK. Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society, 64(3-4), pp.pygs2022-008. Owen, R. 1842. Report on British fossil reptiles. Part II. Reports of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 11, 60–20 Owen, R. 1857. Monograph on the Fossil Reptilia of the Wealden Formations. Part III. Megalosaurus Bucklandi, Monographs of the Palaeontographical Society, 9:34, 1-26, Whyte, M.A., Romano, M., and Watts, W. 2010. Yorkshire dinosaurs: a history in two parts. From: Moody, R. T. J., Buffetaut, E., Naish, D. & Martill, D. M. (eds) Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: A Historical Perspective. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 343, 189–207.
0 Comments
Have you ever found yourself getting into a spiral when trying to identify your fossil snails? If I asked you to picture a snail in your mind you’d probably find yourself thinking of the pesky lettuce-munching variety you find down the garden. These common snails are only one member of a larger group of animals known as the gastropods which live in a wide range of ecosystems from the deep ocean to freshwater ponds - and of course the lettuce patch. In the marine realm gastropods display a broad range of ecologies (including burrowing through the sediment and being carnivorous!) which leads to an astonishing variety of shell shapes and sizes. If you've ever found fossils in the rocks around Malton and Pickering you've more than likely seen a fossil gastropod. The Coralline Oolite, an Upper Jurassic (160-million-year-old) limestone that is exposed around the Vale of Pickering, hosts a wonderful array of these fossils. Quite often these are seen as strange outlines in the rock depicted by lines of brown calcite crystals or just the sediment infills taking the shape of the shell. This can make identifying them a little tricky at times but we’ve put a little guide together to help you find your way! Palaeontology is rammed to the rafters with fiddly terminology, and when describing fossils with protoconchs and abapical striae it can all be a bit baffling. But fear not, the only ones you need to know here are: Spire – Just like a church spire, this is referring to the pointiness of the shell. Snails can be high-spired (tall and usually thin), or low-spired (board and squat). Ribs – thin projections of the shell that are linear, these can either run in the direction of shell coiling (spiral ribs) or from the top of the shell to the bottom, cross-cutting the coils of the shell (axial ribs). Internal mould – These are like natural plaster casts, they are made by the inside of the shell filling up with mud. Later on, as water flows through the rock, the shell dissolves away. Before we dive into the Late Jurassic ocean and identify some snails we just want to throw in a little ‘disclaimer’… the identifications we have used here are the ones that are used frequently in the scientific literature, but there has been no rigorous review of these for well over 100 years … Bourgetia This is one of the big ones - it can be over 10 cm tall! Bourgetia is a high-spired gastropod but it is also quite broad and chunky with each coil of the shell having a rounded outline. The pattern on the shell is normally best seen on the broadest coil towards the base and is a series of grooves that spiral in the same direction as the coil of the shell – this is one of the best features to identify it with but unfortunately it’s not always very well preserved… Two specimens of Bourgetia. Left: Specimen showing well-preserved spiral grooves on the outer surface of the shell. Specimen housed in The Rotunda Museum, Scarborough. Right: The spiral grooves in this specimen have not been preserved. Specimen from East Ayton, near Scarborough, and held by the Yorkshire Geological Society. Pseudomelania These must be the most common gastropod fossils in the Vale of Pickering. They are usually preserved as outlines of shells depicted in large calcite crystals, or just internal moulds. They are again a reasonably large, high-spired gastropod, usually around 5-7 cm to the top of their shells, but they are not as chunky as Bourgetia. Their spire has a much straighter outline and they lack the grooved pattern on the outer shell although neither of these are seen on an internal mould. A selection of images showing the range of preservation in Pseudomelania. Specimens from near Pickering. Left: Specimen is broken through to show the internal mould and shell preserved in large brown calcite crystals around the outside. Middle: Internal mould, nothing remains of the shell. Right: A large and complete example showing details of the outside of the shell, note the straight outline of the spire. Specimen on display in the Yorkshire Museum. Cylindrites The Swiss rolls of the gastropod world! These are maybe one of the stranger looking gastropods of the Oolite especially if they have been eroded at an angle. Each coil of the shell is quite tall but they don’t really have a spire, instead the younger coil of the shell wraps around the previous one making them look like a Swiss roll – especially when they have been broken across the middle. There are quite a few different species of Cylindrites but we’ve never found one preserved well enough to actually differentiate them. Broken specimens of Cylindrites from near Wrelton, Pickering. The image to the right is an example of a complete Cylindrites, although this is from older Jurassic rocks from Gloucestershire it nonetheless gives an impression of what these shells might look like if they were complete. This last specimen is held at the British Geological Survey, image credit GB3D Fossils. Nerinea Nerinea is a very high spired gastropod, it is also extremely thin and has lots of coils in the shell. What makes it really distinct from other snail shells is each coil tightly abuts the next and the shell slightly flares outwards at this point. The shell is typically covered with a series of faint grooves that run along with the coil direction of the shell. Nerinea have internal ribs that give the cross sections of these shells a very strange and irregular appearance! We first found one of these in Hodge Beck, near Kirkbymoorside, but they can be found all over the area when you look hard enough! Different styles of preservation of Nerinea. Left: Complete specimen showing clearly the shell pattern, specimen was collected near Pickering and is held in the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge, image from GB3D Fossils. Top middle: Long-ways slice through a Nerinea shell, the internal spaces have been infilled by large calcite crystals, specimen collect from near Pickering. Top right: A polished slice through what is most likely a Nerinea. The white arrows highlight the internal ribs. This specimen was photographed at Kirkdale Cave, Kirkbymoorside. Bottom: A nearly complete Nerinea showing some of the fine patterns on the shell. This specimen was collected from Hodge Beck, near Kirkbymoorside.
This is the first in our series of fossil identification guides from inland Yorkshire! Have you found any fossil gastropods in the Vale of Pickering? Send us a picture! Author: Jed Atkinson
And decorative it is! When cut and polished, the Frosterley Marble is stunningly beautiful. So much so that you can find it forming decorative pillars, fireplaces and statues in many public building across the north of England, including within the Chapel of the Nine Alters in Durham Cathedral, but it can also be found as far away as Mumbai!
It might at first glance seem a little odd that you can only find these fossils in a single place. After all, the Carboniferous rocks of the region are well known to form continuous layers across the landscape that stretch for many miles, creating the stepped hillsides so characteristic of the Yorkshire and Durham Dales. Many of these layers are so distinctive in their characteristics and thicknesses, that they have been given names by geologists, and by miners and quarrymen long before them. The Frosterley Marble is part of an especially thick layer of rock called the Great Limestone (formed around 330 million years ago), which can be tracked across a large swathe of northern England. So why can’t these particular rocks, abundant in wonderful fossil corals, be found outcropping all across the Pennines? The answer lies in the nature of the environment in which they formed. Those familiar with the geology of limestone, or indeed the geography and biology of modern reefs, will know that these ancient corals were born, lived and died in a tropical sea. For a decent chunk of the Carboniferous Period, much of what is now the UK was much closer the equator than it is today, and was under water. In these warm, shallow seas vast coral reefs thrived, which would later be preserved as the Frosterley Marble, and indeed, all the limestones of the region. But reefs are complex, dynamic places. If you’ve ever been lucky enough to visit the Bahamas, or even just looked at that part of the world from space on Google Maps, you’ll see a patchwork of deeper water and small islands, with shallows between them. Many modern corals can only be found down to a certain depth (due to their reliance on the photosynthetic microbes they co-exist with), and so form thin bands around the margins of these islands where the water is just the right depth for them. Carboniferous England was no different. While limestone rock, formed mostly from microscopic sea creatures, was being laid down across a vast area, this particular coral reef likely existed only around the margin of an island. A thin band of the corals is all that was preserved, and we just happen to be lucky enough that the Bollihope Burn cuts through the rock in just the right spot to reveal them. Which brings us onto something else unusual about the Frosterley Marble: the corals themselves. The corals are of a species named Didunophyllum bipartitum, which is found in other layers of rock too. Often called solitary, horn or rugose corals, these are very different from many of the corals found in today’s seas. While almost all modern corals are colonial (meaning lots of individual organisms living together as part of a single structure) these corals were a singular creature. The last of these rugose corals disappeared at the end of the Permian, around 252 million years ago, but in these Carboniferous seas they were thriving.
Author: Jake Morton
It is the Carboniferous period, and Yorkshire is a swamp. All around you are enormous tree trunks, their branches far beyond your reach. There are other plants lower down – which look like ferns – and in the background is a buzz of insect life. The air is warm and humid, and what little light filters down makes the murky swamp water sparkle.
Fast forward around 319 million years, to the outskirts of the city of Bradford in West Yorkshire. The coal mining industry is in full boom and our fossil is about to come to light. There are several key figures in this tale. First are those who brought the fossil to the attention of the world: the coal miner, William Firth, who discovered the fossil in the coal mine at Toftshaw Bottom, and Louis Compton Miall, curator of the Bradford Philosophical Society. It was Miall who arranged for the fossil to be removed and transported to London for scientific study. The specimen is preserved in several pieces, all a jumble of disarticulated bones and armoured scutes. And so it came to the attention of one of the most important scientific figures of the Victorian age – Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley was a great friend and supporter of Charles Darwin, whose book On The Origin of Species had been published 9 years previously (coincidentally… whilst Darwin was in the nearby town of Ilkley). Despite the Bradford fossil's jumbled state Huxley recognised its importance and so this strange fossil tetrapod became another piece of evidence in support of the new idea of evolution! A formal description of the specimen was published in 1869 and at last our creature has a name: Pholiderpeton scutigerum. So what actually IS Pholiderpeton? We say it is a tetrapod, but what do we mean by that? In the millions of years preceding the coal swamps, the only vertebrates on Earth were fish. Some of these fish, a group known as lobe-finned fish, made the evolutionary transition to be the first vertebrates living on land*. These first terrestrial vertebrates had four feet, and hence all their descendents are known as tetrapods (tetra = four, pod = feet). Confusingly, some later tetrapods have lost their feet as part of adaptations to different habitats (e.g. dolphins). We have four feet too, although our front pair have adapted and we call them hands. The transition to life on land was not a quick change but more of a gradual shift, with many early tetrapods using waterways to hunt and reproduce. These early terrestrial forms are often grouped together as ‘amphibians’ as they likely lived alongside and within freshwater. Technically speaking, the animals which we call amphibians in the modern day (frogs, newts, salamanders) are a different lineage which branched off from tetrapods later on, with definite fossils known from the Triassic (70 million years later than Pholiderpeton). Pholiderpeton belongs to a group of Carboniferous tetrapods known as embolomeres (which are sometimes placed in another group called the anthracosaurs). Embolomeres and other early tetrapods have enjoyed a resurgence in research interest in the last fifty years, casting great light on this most important stage of vertebrate evolution! And so, we come across the final key figure: a young preparator named Jennifer Clack. Her work revealed features of the skull of Pholiderpeton which were previously hidden by rock, and she went on to do a PhD redescribing the specimen in detail. The most important feature she uncovered was a middle ear bone named the stapes. In the 1980s, Pholiderpeton was the earliest specimen of a tetrapod with this bone preserved. Later tetrapods have a rod-like stapes which is associated with a wide indent on the skull, called the temporal notch, which holds the ear drum (tympanum). In these animals the stapes conducts vibrations from the ear drum to the inner ear. The robust stapes of Pholiderpeton and the narrow shape of the temporal notch suggests that it did not have an ear drum, and its hearing capabilities were likely similar to lobe-finned fish. This creature may have adapted its limbs to move on land, but its ear bones had yet to catch up! This raises the question of what the temporal notch was actually used for in Pholiderpeton. A clue can be found in a primitive fish still alive today - the bichir. Many types of fish have spiracles: two small openings on the head which play a role in drawing in water over the gills. Bichirs, however, also possess primitive lungs, and the spiracles have been shown to play an important role in drawing air into these lungs (Graham et al 2014). The earliest tetrapod ancestors of Pholiderpeton occupied a similar environment to the modern day bichir (shallow waters which were prone to drying out or having low oxygen levels) where increased breathing capabilities through the spiracle were an advantage. The swamp waters of Yorkshire contained a large quantity of dead plant material which would have rotted and used up the oxygen - so spiracular breathing may have been useful for Pholiderpeton as well! The stapes would have played a role in controlling spiracle movements. It is only in later tetrapods that these bones and structures are adapted for transmitting sound. You may have already made the connection - if you are a tetrapod, does that mean your ear drum had its evolutionary origins in the fish spiracle? The answer is yes! You also have a stapes - in the human middle ear this bone is often called the stirrup.
We return to the coal swamps. One day our Pholiderpeton dies and is buried in the soft swampy mud, underneath the Lepidodendron log whose bark can be seen next to some of the bones (Clack 1987). This is not the end, however. One day the tetrapod relatives of Pholiderpeton will become one of the most successful animal groups of all time, evolving into a wide range of different shapes and lifestyles… including eventually you, the reader! To quote Jenny Clack on the significance of early tetrapod fossils: “We’re lifting the lid on a key part of the evolutionary story of life on land. What happened then affects everything that happens subsequently, so it affects the fact that we are here and which other animals live with us today.” Author: Rebecca Bennion * This is a huge topic which I cannot adequately cover in one blog, but an excellent summary of the lobe-finned fish to tetrapod transition (60-65 million years before Pholiderpeton) can be found here: evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s12052-009-0119-2 One of the many obituaries to Prof. Jennifer Clack (1947 - 2020): www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01217-8 References Clack, J.A., 1983. The stapes of the Coal Measures embolomere Pholiderpeton scutigerum Huxley (Amphibia: Anthracosauria) and otic evolution in early tetrapods. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 79(2), pp.121-148. Clack, J.A., 1987. Pholiderpeton scutigerum Huxley, an amphibian from the Yorkshire coal measures. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. B, Biological Sciences, 318(1188), pp.1-107. Clack, J.A., 1989. Discovery of the earliest-known tetrapod stapes. Nature, 342(6248), pp.425-427. Clack, J.A., 2002. Patterns and processes in the early evolution of the tetrapod ear. Journal of Neurobiology, 53(2), pp.251-264. Graham, J.B., Wegner, N.C., Miller, L.A., Jew, C.J., Lai, N.C., Berquist, R.M., Frank, L.R. and Long, J.A., 2014. Spiracular air breathing in polypterid fishes and its implications for aerial respiration in stem tetrapods. Nature Communications, 5(1), p.3022. Huxley, T.H., 1869. On a new labyrinthodont from Bradford. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 25(1-2), pp.309-311.
320 million years ago there lived a giant. This giant could grow to heights of over 50 metres, and was covered in scales. You might imagine that I’m talking about a dinosaur, but the titans of the Jurassic would not thunder across the Earth for another 120 million years. This giant was a tree, or at least, it looked like one. Travelling back in time to the Carboniferous Period of Earth history, we find the north of England a very different place to today. Rolling green hills, drystone walls and grouse moors give way to steaming, swampy forests at a time when what would eventually become the United Kingdom lay close to the equator. It is in these primordial quagmires that we find the topic of this month’s blog, the fossil tree: Lepidodendron (or is it Sigillaria? Or Stigmaria? Is this thing even a tree at all?! Whatever, we’ll worry about that later!) The swamps this… plant… called home sat on the margin of a large continent, atop river deltas that were periodically inundated as sea levels rose and fell in cycles (see our blog on cyclothems for more on that!) A plethora of other plants grew alongside them, from giant relatives of horsetails, which are still the bane of gardeners today, to ferns that wouldn’t look out of place growing among the undergrowth of a modern forest. And then there are the animals that lived there, from small lizard-like creatures that would eventually evolve into the diversity of mammals, reptiles and birds we enjoy today, to giant dragonflies the size of hawks, and millipedes as long as cars. And looming over all of it were our floral giants. But back to the first of the two thorny issues I eluded to earlier. What is the name of this tree-like plant we’re talking about? If you dig through the literature or, if you’re a normal person, read the plaques that often sit alongside the fossilised stumps of these monsters, there are two names that frequently crop up: Lepidodendron and Sigillaria. These names are genera (the term used to group living things that’s one up from a species, like Homo or Tyrannosaurus). So that one’s easy enough, we have two closely-related but distinctly different types of “tree” living together, which can both be found as fossils across northern England. But from there things get a bit more confusing. The most common part of these plants to find are their roots, which does make some degree of sense. After all, you’ve got to be buried underground to become a fossil, and so roots are already half way there. And these fossils are very easy to find. If there’s Carboniferous sandstone in the nearby hills, odds are you’ll come across them in the beds of nearby streams and rivers (just look out for brown or buff-coloured rocks with regular, circular indentations). These fossils are so common, in fact, that they have their own name: Stigmaria. Stigmaria is what palaeontologists refer to as a ‘form taxon’, which is a fancy way of saying the roots of Lepidodendron and Sigillaria are virtually identical, and I’ve got to call this fossil I just found something! Alright, so we’ve resolved the naming issues (for the most part), but what’s all this about them not being trees? Surely that’s what you call a 50 metre tall plant with a trunk and a leafy canopy at the top, right? Well, no. At least, not in this case. Both Lepidodendron and Sigillaria belong to a group of plants called lycopsids. Examples of lycopsids like clubmosses and quillworts can still be found in the boggy upland areas of northern England today, although they’re much smaller than their prehistoric relatives, and rarely reach more than a few inches off the ground. These types of plants are much more primitive than the trees that form today’s forest though. Their enormous trunks weren’t made of wood like modern trees, but rather were soft and spongy, and they reproduced through spores, rather than forming seeds. But it’s not just roots we find. Their bark also fossilises, and when it does it resembles intricate scales covering the skin of some primordial lizard. In fact, the name Lepidodendron literally means ‘scale tree’. Their leaves occasionally show up too, as do the cones from which they released spores. In many cases, these various bits and pieces are also indistinguishable between species. However, the most impressive of these fossils are their giant stumps, of which a handful have been ground across the UK, and many of them are on display in parks and museums. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a favourite though… In the graveyard of St. Thomas Church, in the sleepy Weardale village of Stanhope, County Durham, sits one such tree stump. This one is a Sigillaria (it’s often easier to tell when you’ve got more of the plant), and it’s been here since 1964. It was originally found in a sandstone quarry, along with a number of other stumps, a few miles north of Stanhope back in 1914. In researching for this blog, curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to head out to see if I could find the old quarry. Records from the period are sketchy at best, but low and behold, the quarry does still exist. It can be found near Edmundbyers Cross, on the roadside just south of the junction between the B6278 and the small road leading north-east toward Waskerley. There’s not much left of the original quarry (given that it hasn’t been active for a century) but there are still exposures of sandstone to be found, and a decent amount of scree where I managed to pick up a few scrappy plant fossils (pictured below). The site is on open access land, so feel free to go check it out for yourself. Who knows? Maybe there are still fossil trees to be unearthed there! These ancient behemoths give a fascinating insight, not only into how the north of England has changed over millions of years, but how living things have evolved and changed too. What once were titans of a swampy forest, now scarcely warrant a second glance, yet their fossils remind us of their glory days long past. Author: Jake Morton References:
Thomas, B. A. and Seyfullah, L. (2015). Stigmaria Brongniart: a new specimen from Duckmantian (Lower Pennsylvanian) Brymbo (Wrexham, North Wales) together with a review of known casts and how they were preserved. Geol. Mag. 152 (5), pp. 858–870. Plant Fossils of the British Coal Measures. Cleal, C. J. and Thomas, B. A. Palaeontological Association, London, 1994 Green hills laced with drystone walls, impressive rocky cliffs, and limestone pavements with their unique and delicate flora are all icons of the Yorkshire Dales. It is a landscape unapologetically dominated and influenced by the limestone that underpins it. At around 350 - 330 million years old the lowermost limestone units are up to five times more distant in time from Tyrannosaurus rex than we are from that tyrant lizard, and yet these are still not the oldest rocks in Yorkshire! Lurking beneath the limestone is something far older still, from a time before creatures colonized the land. These rocks tell the story of the death of an ocean and the birth of mountains! Before we dive too deep we need a bit of geographic context, and prepare yourself for a shock. During the time period we are interested in here (the Early Ordovician) Yorkshire was in the south. Very south. The southern hemisphere, in fact. I’ll let you digest that thought for a moment… We find ourselves in the ocean off the northern margin of a tiny little continent named Avalonia. Across the sea to our east lies Baltica, another small continent that will eventually become much of north-west Europe. To our north lies Laurentia (North America, Greenland, Northern Ireland and Scotland). Between these continents lay the Iapetus Ocean. Now you’ve got this picture in your heads let’s look at the rocks! Let us begin in around the village of Ingleton and the Waterfalls Trail along the River Twiss. At around 470 million years old, these are Yorkshire’s oldest rocks. These rocks, known as the Ingleton Group, are a type of rock known as greywackes (pronounced grey wacky), which is not only the best name for a sedimentary rock but it is quite appropriate as they are tilted and folded to as much as 70 degrees at Thornton Force waterfall! Like most of the rocks featured in this blog they were deposited by massive underwater landslides (turbidity currents) cascading off the margins of continents and bringing silt and sand into deep oceanic waters (check out our blog on Pendle Hill for more on turbidity currents!). Remember those three little contents all sitting pretty in the Southern Hemisphere? Well things were on the move: Avalonia (remember that included Yorkshire!) was heading north (yay!). This wasn’t the best thing for the Iapetus Ocean though which was being squeezed between the continents. The sediments of the Ingleton Group were pushed up from the sea bed, bent, buckled and eroded. This all took a considerable amount time, and no rocks were being laid down in the region whilst it was happening. Our story picks up again in the Ashgill (Ordovician, around 440 million years ago), with the deposition of the Coniston Limestone Group. These sediments were deposited in much shallower water and locally is quite fossiliferous. On into the Silurian! And the Iapetus is still closing! The rocks of Yorkshire again record deep water sediments: more turbidite sequences, only this time there are more fossils. In the depths of this closing ocean the low oxygen muds preserved some very delicate fossils.
This type is called Monograptus, ‘mono’ meaning ‘one’ because they have only a single thread of cups in a row. Monograptus was quite abundant during the Silurian and some surfaces can be covered in them, like the above block from a quarry in Horton-in-Ribblesdale. Eventually the Iapetus ocean closed completely, all three continents crunched together in a mountain building event called the Caledonian Orogeny. It’s this mountain building event that gave birth to the Scottish mountains, although they were much larger mountains when they were first formed. Over time the high areas of land produced in Yorkshire by this event were eroded and new seas flooded this ancient land. It is now the Carboniferous, and the classic limestones of the Yorkshire Dales which we all know and love are being formed. The time gap between these rock units has created a type of geological boundary called an unconformity, which can be seen in the valley sides and quarry faces of Ribblesdale, Crummack Dale and Chapel le Dale near Ingleton. At sites like these you can truly get a glimpse of the enormity of geological time, and peel back the layers of the landscape to reveal the dramatic histories of lost oceans! Author: Jed Atkinson
If I asked you to name some important places in the history of science, what would you say? Universities, observatories, and museums, of course, but what about outdoor spaces or fossil sites? You might mention the importance of the Galapagos islands to Charles Darwin, and Lyme Regis to Mary Anning… but did you know that one of the most significant sites to early evolutionary and palaeontological thinking is a small, unassuming rock face in the Vale of Pickering? In the summer of 1821, quarrymen extracting limestone near Kirkbymoorside struck upon a cave containing large quantities of animal bones. Little did they know at the time that they had just unearthed a true treasure trove of fossils and opened a window onto a lost age of Yorkshire’s history. Initially, the bones were little regarded, it was less about opening windows into the past and more about filling holes… by which we mean potholes in the local roads, which were filled using the fossil bones.
Enter Reverend William Buckland, Professor of Geology at the University of Oxford, a remarkable and eccentric scientist and clergyman. His scientific discoveries were many, underpinning much of our modern understanding of topics such as fossil ecosystems and glaciation. He was also the describer of the first English dinosaur fossil (although it wasn’t called that at the time). In all these discoveries he was ably assisted by his wife Mary who edited and illustrated many of his manuscripts.
For the Reverend Professor, there was something strange about the bones from Kirkdale Cave. He noted that hyena bones were abnormally common, including bones of both young and old individuals. The other bones in the cave could be considered as large prey animals. The thoughts that this cave was home to a pack of hungry hyenas was beginning to formulate in Buckland’s mind. To test his theory Buckland required an assistant: Billy. Billy was a hyena. Yes, Buckland acquired a live hyena to see what chewed bones looked like to compare to those found in the cave. The remains of Billy’s luncheon looked like the remains in the cave and his poo contained tiny pieces of broken bone - just like the coprolites which had been found! Buckland was convinced that the bones had entered the cave NOT by being washed thousands of miles in a flood but by being dragged into the cave by living hyenas and therein consumed. Cue profound revelations! The cave was actually lived in by hyenas – this not only meant there were hyenas roaming Yorkshire, it also meant that prey animals such as elephants and hippos were there too! As we know from the modern that Yorkshire is too cold for these creatures, so we must deduce that either these animals lived in different climates than they do in the modern or that the climate has changed over time. Buckland’s studies on Kirkdale Cave were of great significance to early palaeontological science! They showed crucial evidence for changes in animal faunas and climate over time, as well as demonstrating that past environments could be reconstructed by careful analysis and experimentation. Fossil mammals from Kirkdale Cave are in collections all over the world (including some at the Te Papa museum in Wellington, New Zealand!) although the nearest place to Kirkdale itself to see them is the display at Whitby Museum. After seeing the fossil bones at local museums, why not visit the cave itself? The abandoned quarry is located in a beautiful valley near the historic church of St Gregory’s Minster near Kirkbymoorside. The hyena bones are now long gone and the only fossils to be found at the site are those in the underlying Jurassic bedrock. If you visit, look out for polished surfaces with gastropods at the base of the cliff, and sea urchin spines further up near the cave. It is an SSSI (site of special scientific interest) so no hammering is allowed, but there are plenty of loose stones in the quarry and the nearby stream. The sea urchin spines are iconic of a certain rock layer called the ‘Coral Rag’. Kirkdale Cave and other cave systems in the Vale of Pickering form near the junction between the rubbly-looking Coral Rag and the layer underneath. These Jurassic coral reef fossils do not get much attention in modern retellings of the story of Kirkdale Cave, which we think is a shame as they are the only things still visible at the site! Please tag us in anything you find - we'd love to see them! Author: Rebecca Bennion References:
Boylan, P. (2022). "200th Anniversary of the discovery and first publication of the Kirkdale Cave fossil hyaena den, near Kirby Moorside, North Yorkshire". Circular of the Yorkshire Geological Society. 636: 19-26 Buckland, W. (1822). "Account of an assemblage of fossil teeth and bones of elephants, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, bear, tiger, and hyaena, and sixteen other animals, discovered in a cave at Kirkdale, Yorkshire, in the year 1821: with a comparative view of five similar caverns in various parts of England, and others on the Continent". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. 112: 171–236. Wright, J. K. (1972). The stratigraphy of the Yorkshire Corallian. Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society. 39(2): 225-266. Taking some time to look at an outcrop of rock can be like taking a trip back in time. Our human brains can barely comprehend the span of a century, so it can be truly mind-boggling to think that a small cliff-face, little more than a few meters tall, could represent many thousands of years of our planet’s history… Here at Fossils in t’Hills we spend a lot of time talking about the Carboniferous Period. It’s a term some of our readers will know well, but for others one that might require a little more explanation than we’ve given it in the past. This month we’re going to shine a little light on the Carboniferous, and its relevance to the rocks, fossils and landscapes of northern England. To put the Carboniferous Period into context we need to dive into what geologists call ‘deep time’. We can get a better understanding of deep time by thinking of our planet’s history as a book. This monstrous tome has 450 pages, with each representing around 10 million years of history. Unfortunately, the first 300 pages have been mostly torn out, screwed up, folded, set on fire, and what’s left stuffed back in between the later pages. But that’s alright; for those of us with a keen interest in fossils, it’s really only the last 60 pages that matter! There’s a lot packed into this story, with a wide cast of characters and many twists and turns. To help make sense of it all, geologists divide the plot into chapters called eras and periods. One of these periods is called the Carboniferous. The Carboniferous Period spans around 359 million years ago to around 299 million years ago, meaning it’s covered on pages 414 through to 420 (concluding a full six pages before the dinosaurs appear). The word ‘Carboniferous’ means ‘carbon-bearing,’ a name it owes, in part, to northern England, where coal has been mined for centuries. But aside from fuelling (literally) the Industrial Revolution, the rocks of northern England are responsible for the incredible landscapes that make this part of the country so special. If you’ve ever been out walking in the hills of the Yorkshire Dales or North Pennines, and taken some time to observe the landscape around you, it’s hard to miss the fact that many of the hills, from Pen-y-ghent to Cross Fell, have flat summits. Looking even closer, you might have noticed that their slopes have a stepped appearance to them. This is no accident, but a direct result of the underlying geology. In places where streams and rivers carve out valleys and gorges, we can begin to see layers in the rocks, laying one on top of the other. Each one is made of sediment (loose material like sand and mud) laid down atop the one below. Some layers took thousands of years to form, while others formed in a matter of hours. The higher up a sequence of rocks you go, the closer you are to the present day, and the further down, the further back in time you go. There are three main types of rock you’re likely to come across, and each represents a different kind of environment found in the Carboniferous. Blocky, grey rocks, like those that characterise Malham Cove and Gordale Scar, are limestone. They often have a knobbly texture to them, and were formed at the bottom of shallow, tropical seas, like those found in the Bahamas today. These seas were bursting with life, with vast coral reefs home to fish, snails, brachiopods and crinoids, and their fossils are commonly found in this type of rock. When these creatures died, their remains were mixed with limey mud on the seabed, which over time was solidified to make limestone. Dark, thinly layered rocks are shale (also known as mudstone or siltstone). Perhaps unsurprisingly, these rocks are made from mud and silt. They general represent areas of slow-moving water, where fine particles can slowly settle out of the water. This often happens off-shore, where the water is deeper and calmer. Fossils are less common in this type of rock, but they can occasionally contain very fragile, very flat, plant remains that were washed out to sea. Rough, cream or buff-coloured rocks are sandstone. If you look closely with a hand lens, or even just the naked eye, you can often see the individual sand grains that make them up. We often associate sand with beaches and deserts, but many of the sandstones found in northern England can trace their origins to vast rivers deltas on the shores of an ancient continent. It is within these layers that coal seams can be found, formed from the swampy forests that grew atop the deltas, in an environment not entirely unlike the Amazon Delta or mangrove swamps of the Caribbean today. It’s here that we find many of the most spectacular plant fossils. But look closer at these rocks and a pattern begins to emerge. There is a sequence: limestone, shale, sandstone, and the sequence repeats, over and over. But why? To change the type of rock layers being laid down, you need to change the environment. After all, the only way to stop a coral reef laying down layers of limestone is to stop it being a coral reef. To get this kind of change you need to change the sea level. In this case, the sea level has to fall, bringing the distant shoreline closer to the pristine coral seas, and with it, sediment carried by rivers. At first the reefs are buried by mud and silt – the finer particles that can drift much further before falling out of the water – laying down layers of shale on top of the limestone. As sea levels continue to fall, and the shoreline grows closer still, larger, heavier particles are laid on top, forming layers of sandstone. Eventually, the river delta has pushed far enough outwards into the sea that its surface is at sea level, and now the coal swamps can begin to develop. But then the sea level rises again, and the limestone-forming coral seas return. To understand why sea levels were changing, we need to leave behind the warm tropics, and take a brief trip to the poles. Throughout the Carboniferous the world was in the grips of an Ice Age. This seems an odd statement, given that we’ve just talked about warm, coral seas and swampy forests, but at this time in history the UK was much nearer the equator. Ice ages don’t usually cover the whole planet in ice, and even during the more familiar, more recent Ice Age of woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed cats, the tropics remained, well, tropical. There was ice at the poles, as there is today, but ice sheets don’t stay still. In cycles that lasted hundreds of thousands of years, ice sheets wax and wane. As they shrink, sea levels rise, creating more space for coral reefs at the tropics, and when they grow, the sea levels fall, allowing river deltas to push out into the sea. These cycles repeat themselves over and over across the north of England and beyond, and they’re so well known to geologists that they have a name: cyclothems. The softer rocks within these sequences erode more quickly, creating ledges of harder rock. These are responsible for the stepped hills and waterfalls that make the hills of northern England such a spectacular place to visit. Author: Jake Morton
A lazy warm breeze rustles through the trees on a grassy hill slope. A herd of hippopotamuses are wallowing down in the valley as a rhinoceros wanders over to a watering hole to take a refreshing drink. Just audible, bellowing in the distance are a herd of elephants. It’s the end of a pleasant day near Skipton during the Ice Age… Hang on, I hear you all say, the Ice Age!? You’re probably all hoping for the rhinoceros to be wool-clad and the distant elephants to be of the shaggy-haired variety. Although these images aren’t wrong, they’re not the whole picture, as the Ice Age (also known as the Pleistocene) was a time of alternating warm and cold climates. During these warm intervals Yorkshire was visited by a host of animals with a distinctly more African feel. The Pleistocene spanned from around 2.58 million years ago through to 12 thousand years ago. Across that time there were repeated cycles in the climate. These can be divided into glacial (episodes when the ice sheets advanced as temperatures plummeted) and interglacial periods (the warm and pleasant intervals when the ice sheets retreated). These climatic changes were the result of cyclical shifts in the earth’s orbit around the sun and changes to the angle and direction of the earth’s axis. There were many of these glacial and interglacial periods, with the last glacial interval only ending around 12 thousand years ago. The preceding interglacial warm period, known as the Ipswichian, ran from approximately 130 -115 thousand years ago, and was the only time that hippos migrated northwards into Britain (Gascoyne et al. 1981). It is estimated that Britain was up to 5 degrees warmer during the Ipswichian than today (Candy et al. 2016). So how do we know there were hippos, rhinos and elephants roaming around near Skipton? During the 1870s a quarry at Lothersdale, just southwest of Skipton, exposed an ancient fissure in the limestone filled up with clay, sand, pebbles and bones! This became known as the Raygill Fissure. During the Ipswichian, the fissure would have been a steep sided pothole, with an opening at the surface few meters across. In 1880 the Yorkshire Geological Society set about excavating the fissure fill and a fund was set up to raise the £50 necessary to conduct the exploration. In June of that year the fund reached a mighty £60, and work commenced (Green et al., 1880). The team excavated some 40m of the near vertical pothole. The fossil teeth and bones were found in a distinct layer towards the lower portion of the excavation along with rounded pebbles of locally derived stones (Green et al., 1880). The fossils included remains of straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), narrow-nosed rhinoceros (Stephanorhinus hemitoechus) and teeth belonging to hyena (Crocuta crocuta). There were other bones too, a molar and part of a tusk from a hippo (Hippopotamus amphibius) and even reports of a tooth from a brown bear (Ursus arctos) and cave lion (Panthera spelaea). Many of these bones were donated to the Leeds Museum and are now held in the collections at the Leeds Discovery Center. They Raygill material held there comprises many dozens of teeth from the elephant Palaeoloxodon and the rhino Stephanorhinus, but with very few bones. This may be due to the way the Raygill material was deposited and the way in which it was preserved. The bones were well and truly embedded into the rock by a natural cement. In the original excavation report, they remark how they were unable to extract the bones whole from the matrix as they would just splinter, and most were already just fragments anyway. Combined with this, the predominance of teeth could be from the way the bones accumulated in the fissure. Unlike the famous Kirkdale Cave in Kirkbymoorside (discovered some 50 years earlier) and Victoria Cave in the Yorkshire Dales, the bone in Raygill were not brought in by hyenas. The Raygill fossils were found in a layer of sand and rounded stones and many of the teeth have a battered appearance, which tells us that flowing water was involved in the deposition of the fossil-yielding layer. The presence of only the most robust bone and teeth adds to the suggestion that the bones were either washed into the fissure, or were from animals that got to close to the edge of the fissure and fell in with their bones later scattered and eroded by water. It still leaves an interesting question about the hippo bones. The entrance to the fissure would have been on a hill 160 m above the valley floor, not exactly where one would expect to find a wallowing hippo... Could it have been that hippos had a slightly different lifestyle during the Ipswichian, grazing on the hillslopes (O’Connor and Lord, 2013)? Or, could it be that a partial carcass was dragged up from the valley by a predator, the bones only to later be washed into the fissure? As the quarry continued its operations more of the fissure was exposed until the excavations were eventually abandoned as it became increasingly difficult and dangerous to continue. Nonetheless, the quarry continued to work its way through the fissure, destroying possibly one of the richest Ipswichian bone deposits in Yorkshire. The Quarry itself eventually closed in the 1980s to become a fishing lake, although sadly there are no hippos swimming there today. We wish to thank the Leeds Discovery Centre for allowing us access to the Raygill Fissure material, and Paul Kabrna (Craven and Pendle Geological Society) for photographs. Author: Jed Atkinson References:Candy I, White TS and ELias S. 2016. How warm was Britain during the Last Interglacial? A critical review of Ipswichian (MIS 5e) palaeotemperature reconstructions. Journal of Quaternary Science. v. 31(8), p. 857-868.
Gascoyne M, Currant AP and Lord TC. 1981. Ipswichian fauna of Victoria Cave and the marine palaeoclimatic record. Nature. v.294, p. 652-654. Green AH, Miall LC, Briggs J and Davis JW. 1880. Report of the Raygill Fissure exploration committee. Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society. v.7, p.300-306 O'Connor, T and Lord T. 2013. Cave Palaeontology, Chapter 15, p. 225-238 IN Caves and Karsts of the Yorkshire Dales. Eds. Waltham T and Lowe D. British Cave Research Association What do a 700-year-old inn, Robin Hood and 340 million years of earth history have to do with a waterfall in Yorkshire? Turns out, quite a bit! A visit to Hardraw Force waterfall can feel like a trip back in time. The historic Green Dragon Inn at the start of the walk to the fall dates to the Middle Ages, and preserves many of its original features. Indeed, sitting beside the roaring fire, under the wooden beams of its roof, you’d be forgiven for expecting the whole band of merry men to come waltzing in at any moment! But there’s a deeper, much older, story to be told here, and to discover it we have to leave behind the comfortable warmth of the fire, head out the back, and journey into the wilds. From here the path follows the Hardraw Beck at a distance, before joining it for the final stretch, up through an enchanting wooded gorge to the fall itself. Hardraw Force is quite the spectacle, with the water of the beck plummeting over a lip of harder rock towards a plunge pool some 30 meters below. This is the largest single drop of any permanent, above-ground waterfall in England, a feet owed to its geology. The rocks here date to the Visean stage of the early Carboniferous, around 340 million years ago. At that time, Yorkshire was a very different place. A far cry from the wet, temperate climate we enjoy (or not!) today, this land once basked in the warm sunshine of the tropics. And yet, the Earth was in the grips of an Ice Age. Don’t expect to find any woolly mammoths or sabre-toothed cats here though (that more famous glacial period came much later). This was an age long before the first mammals, and almost 100 million years before the first dinosaurs roamed the Earth. As ice sheets waxed and waned at the poles, sea levels in these tropical latitudes rose and fell. At their highest, the region sat below a warm, shallow sea, comparable to the Bahamas of today. These waters were bursting with life, and the remains of long-gone coral reefs form the layer of limestone at the top of Hardraw Force. As sea levels fell and the shoreline crept closer, more and more mud washed in from the land and soon the reefs were buried. This is the origin of the darker mudstones found at the base of the waterfall. Between the limestone and mudstones are thick layers of coarser sandstone, laid down when sea levels dropped even further and yet more sediment washed in the from the land. Vast river deltas developed, like those of the Amazon today, and great swamps flourished atop them. Lurking within these sandstone rocks is evidence of a dragon that once dwelt here. Although, to call the beast a dragon might be a bit of an exaggeration. This dragon didn’t have wings, it certainly didn’t breathe fire, and it probably didn’t even have scales. Our ‘green dragon’ was an early tetrapod, the group of animals from which all land-living vertebrates are descended, including us humans. It was more like a large salamander, heaving its bulky body through this primeval swamp, and leaving footprints in the sand as it went. These trackways, preserved forever in a block of sandstone, provide us a brief glimpse into this lost world. The story of this specimen is quite an intriguing one. It was found by schoolboy John Chapman around 1966 or 67, who was studying the waterfall and its rocks as part of his geology classes. He gifted it to his teacher, Stuart Maude, who used the specimen in his lessons for a number of years, before eventually donating it to the Natural History Museum in London, where it remains on display to this day. A replica can also be seen on display at Cliffe Castle Museum in Keighley. But what is a trace fossil? And why are they so important to our understanding of past life? When we imagine fossils it’s hard not to picture a wonderfully complete dinosaur skeleton on display in some museum gallery. It’s a nice image, but rarely is it close to the truth. Most fossils are little more than fragments of bone or shell, leaving its discoverer with an often squashed and rarely complete jigsaw to piece together. And then there are trace fossils, not the actual remains of a living thing, but rather something that it left behind through the general activities of its life. This can include coprolites (fossil poo!), eggs shells, or in this case, footprints. While body fossils can tell us what a creature looked like, trace fossils can tell us how it lived. It's quite rare for us to come across a track-maker at the end of its track, so working out exactly whodunnit is often impossible. As such, trace fossils are often given names of their own, in this case Palaeosauropus, which means ‘old lizard foot.’ While no body fossils of our green dragon have ever been found at Hardraw, we do have fossils of similarly aged early tetrapods from elsewhere in the world, from which we can draw comparisons. From them, we can deduce that our trackmaker was 50-75 cm long and likely spent most of its time on land, only returning to the water to reproduce as frogs and salamanders do today. While only footprints, this is the oldest evidence we have for a creature of this kind, one not too far removed from our own ancestor, anywhere in the UK. So, there’s the green dragon and the earth history, but what about the Robin Hood connection? Well, to the best of my knowledge the famous outlaw never encountered a dragon (citation needed), and it’s unlikely he ever visited Hardraw. The Green Dragon Inn does date back to the 13th century though, which is when most of his exploits were said to have taken place, and the 1991 film “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” included an infamous scene shot at the waterfall, so I guess there’s that! Author: Jake Morton References
Bird HC, Milner AC, Shillito AP and Butler RJ, 2020. A lower Carboniferous (Visean) tetrapod trackway represents the earliest record of an edopoid amphibian from the UK. Journal of the Geological Society, 177, pp. 276-282. Milner AR and Sequeira SEK, 1994. The temnospondyl amphibians from the Visean of East Kirkton, West Lothian, Scotland. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh: Earth Sciences, 84, pp. 331-361. |
Archives
February 2024
Categories
All
|