Sand Bay

Monday the 25^th of February, we went on a short fieldtrip with half the first-year geology group to Sand Bay in Weston-super-Mare, near Bristol.

The rocky shore we were at is within the tidal zone, so during high tide, it lies under water. We were therefore working under considerable time pressure, and the slightest delay could mean the lives of every single member of the group!

No, just joking… (I gave up puns for lent, so I have to make do with other forms of low humour.) The tide does not come in that fast, and as long as you always keep an eye on the water level, you should be fine. The greatest danger here would be standing too close to those cliffs for too long.

But, again, be careful with where you stand, and, if you have to go up close, do it quickly and then go back immediately. If you do that, there is little risk.

The beach was full of round limestone rocks, nicely polished by the washing waves every day. It did not take long before all paleontologists were scanning them for fossils.

As always, there is this mysterious lag period where you walk around, staring at the ground, but find nothing. You bend down to have closer look, but still don’t see a thing of note. It is not until you find the first that the rest start to crop up everywhere, even where just had just passed – which ironically turns out to be packed with nice fossils that you for some reason were blind to a minute ago.

The point of this fieldtrip was to teach us certain geological field skills. The university staff here seems to have a fetish for the word ‘skill’, and gladly apply it to anything that relates to an ability, no matter how undeveloped. I guess it is just that it sounds good when you say that the students are acquiring skills in the field. It makes us sound professional. (The same goes for the word ‘feedback’, but this is not the place to be bitchy about the meaning of words…)

We had four exercises to do. So, get on with it.

I don’t want to sound cranky, but it is difficult not to, when the teachers do not even care to show us how to do the things we are tasked to do in the exercises. Half of us have never done fieldwork in geology before. In the blistering cold winds, and surrounded by fascinating fossils, the motivation for walking around and trying to guess what they want us to do dropped to the bottom.

Luckily, James, Nigel and I had done many of these things before, so we did fine, but there was still much hesitation and standing with the notebook and pencil in cold-shivering hands glaring at an outcrop in front of us, each probably having an internal struggle to find any point in this. We want to search for and find nice fossils!

In the end, we did what we had to, but, in hindsight, it could have been done half as painfully and in half the time if we had just been prepared properly by the staff that has years of experience of these things and therefore should be able to go through each step clearly and give tips from personal experience on how to make things more efficient.

They did not give much introduction to the history of this place, except for the brief notes they had given us in a handout earlier. All we knew was that the rocks were Carboniferous of age and formed in a shallow marine environment, and that there were some volcanic sediments mixed around here as well.

The idea was for us to start to investigate the environment for ourselves and try to puzzle some pieces together, rather than having someone give us all the answers. Brilliant pedagogical thinking, in theory at least. Honestly, I am glad they at least try.

But argh, don’t let me spoil this post by complaining so much! It was a really good day! It had been so long since I saw fossils (in real life).

What I really was hoping to find was a rugose coral, since I don’t have any yet. I have plenty of tabulate corals – the other main type of corals at that time – including my very first fossil. Both types of corals lived on the bottom of shallow seas, filtering food particles directly from the water. That is about as much as they did… (I’m not sure of how they reproduced, but cnidarian life cycles tend to be quite interesting, so maybe the fun bits happened then!) The tabulate corals grew in tight colonies, and so were very important for building ancient reefs; the rugose corals were more solitary.

And some were small enough to bring back home.

What has been preserved is the calcareous outer skeleton it secreted outside its body; the actual animal would live inside, protected from most danger, and let out its tentacles to feed from the currents. Perhaps not the most fantastic of organisms, but they make very nice fossils!

A really amazing one I found embedded in a huge block of rock (too big to carry) (and too stuck in the rock to pick out) could be a rugose coral preserved in very nice, large, clear calcite crystals, but it could also be a crinoid (sea lily), another filter-feeder, but related to starfish and sea urchins.

I found at least one fossil that is surely a crinoid.

But only a cross section of one of the hard plates of its stalk, so not really much to see. Nigel, on the other hand, found a fantastic bit of its mouth and tentacles! It was so incredibly nice, that James and (mostly) I were bitter and jealous for hours (not really, but we pretended, because it was the best we could do… damn Nigel! hahaha).

And as if it was not enough, Nigel later found a huge rugose coral, only half attached to a rock, the other side nicely showing its cone shape. Damn that man again!

I did find a pretty fun crinoid fossil with its stalk plates sort of separated a bit.

I also picked up something I am quite sure is a brachiopod.

And, finally, a rock that looks just like the typical textbook model of dip-slip faults!

(If you are unfamiliar with what that is, don’t worry… it is really only funny if you have seen tons and tons of those diagrams before.)

In two weeks or so, it is time for another fieldtrip, but this time probably with less fossils. *sob*