Fossil Hunting - Assignment 5 draft

This isn't mean't to be my final assignment, more a dry run, taking advantage of our recent holiday to Lyme Regis and the 'jurassic coast', home of a multitude of fossils.

The idea of the post is to tell the story of fossil hunting, the anticipation leading through to the search and hopeful sucess, before reviewing the end result. As always, I was shooting with the family in tow, so the opportunity to concentrate on the artistic merits of the photography was limited. As I say though, this is something of a dry run.

All along the route from the campsite, clues about the sea were in evidence. Here there is the directionality from left to right (towards the sea), indicated by the yellow lines.

But more specifically, some of the housenames give further clues as to what we might find on the beach....

And so to the beach. The fossils are embedded in the cliffs and get revealed at high tide when the waves erode the cliffs. The scale of the cliffs are significant (some of the highest along the south coast) and completely dwarf the hunters. And yes, practically all these people are on the hunt for fossils.... I particularly like the woman in white walking across the foot of the image, somewhat akin to the mane in Cartier-Bresson's image of a man walking through the scene (http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=cartier+bresson&view=detail&id=6059C76A38DF9D87ACD8C5E3746560753E208BDB&first=31&FORM=IDFRIR)

Of course there are a lot of stones to choose from....

... when this is all we expect to find. This is an amonite, probably more than 80 million years old is less than one inch across and hard to spot!

One thing I didn't realise is that fossil hunting is not without risk. The base of the cliffs are a mixture of mud and shale which is unstable. Despite the warnings, these people were hunting close to the base of the cliffs which can, and do, collapse without warning. The appeal is that they might find fresh fossils undisturbed, but in practice these fossils are often not fully formed, still being semi-formed impressions in the mud.

So after a long day on the beach, we made our way back to the campsite to study what we'd found, and start the long process of preparing the specimens to reveal their full beauty....

....if only they were all this obvious on the beach!