Hey guys my name is Emma and i'm from Em gems and i'm currently studying Geoconservation as a
masters i'm here at the Etches collection today and i thought i would take you to Kimmeridge
bay with me and we're gonna take a look at the fossils now if you've never been here i really
recommend having a look because the ammonites and other fossils you can see here are really amazing
to look at and you might be fortunate and get a bit of a better day than i managed to pick today
but i just thought i would mention a little bit about the safety and precautions you should take
and also the fossil hunting code so here at Kimmeridge you're not allowed to fossil hunt
unless it's exciting material in the foreshore so just come here enjoy the fossils for what they are
if there's anything scientifically valuable the Etches collection and Steve will collect
it and preserve it for your benefit but um just come down here look around and see what you can
find but there are a few safety issues let's say so the where the ammonites are they're in
these kind of large slabs and they're extremely slippery so be very careful when you are walking
and also the cliffs are always unstable so whilst you're down here you may hear little falls of
rocks and they're normally on the smaller scale but just don't go too near them because you will
potentially put your life at risk and it's never worth that no fossil is worth that
and then also the tides as well so just come here enjoy the fossils but just enjoy them
for what they are and enjoy your day so i've just taken a little walk around and they're very easy
to spot you just kind of have to walk slowly and you'll see they're almost like little disc shapes
and there's just ammonites all over the place so there's two lovely specimens here and you can see
they're kind of orange coloring in where the shell has been replaced and they are fragile and they
are crushed but you can clearly see what they are and it's really really good fun to come down here
and see how many you can spot because they are all over the place the more you look the more you'll
find so there's some around here and then if we move over we can see if we can find some more
so there's another one here and you'll see like fragments all over the place so you just have
to kind of once you get the eye for them you'll spot them and it's really good fun so you can see
they're just all over the place and they do get attacked by the waves quite regularly obviously
with the tides coming in and it does damage them but when these ones are worn away another set are
revealed underneath and that's the beauty of it it's kind of you know they are getting destroyed
but it's you can come and enjoy them and it's just the natural process of them so really cool
so the terrain of the beach here at Kimmeridge isn't suitable for everyone you have got to be
very careful especially in weather like this it is a slippery beach and then it's just a load of
boulders everywhere and that just shows you that these boulders have come from somewhere you've
got cliff collapses you've got you know dangerous tides so just take your time with this place but
there's a lot that can be found so we're going to take a wonder now and see what else we can find
so here we have a slightly smaller ammonite specimen but it's also got the nodes still
intact so you can see it's being worn by the sea a lot but you can see these little dots here
and they're all the nodes on the worlds going around here so it's a really nice thing to see
that they're still kind of preserved and they haven't been completely washed away.
Here we have what appears to be a fragment of an ammonite and what we can see is the lovely coarse
ribbing of the species and the beauty of ribbing and suture lines is it can help us identify the
different species of ammonite that we're looking at which is really useful to dating and aging
the rock because of biostratigraphy so that is literally using the different ammonite species
as an age guide to correlate the rocks so they have a use and they're not just pretty the ribs
so here in this loose boulder here we've got what appears to be fossilized wood so
the actual most of the wood has washed away or it's disappeared but you can see the kind
of darker material here of the remains that is left so it's really cool to see here because i
don't know if this is a super common thing to see it's mainly the ammonites in the foreshore area
but um there's definitely there was definitely some organic material here which is pretty cool.