On the beach: Fossils on the Seashore

Stephen K Donovan (UK)

The south of England in the late 1940s and 1950s must have been a wonderland for the field palaeontologist. There were still many working or recently discarded quarries. Transport was easy and affordable by rail and bus. Visits to quarries were rarely difficult. It was a world away from the mid-1970s, when I first picked up a geological hammer.

My favourite guide to the field was the marvellous Directory of British Fossiliferous Localities (Arkell et al., 1954) (Fig. 1), which has now been on my bookshelves for 50 years. It was not surprising that 20+ years later some things had changed. One example was when a group of us ‘bunked’ into a disused Chalk pit near Cliffe, Kent (Arkell et al., 1954, p. 57) only to find a notice on the way out that it was MoD property and we were to keep out. Oops. We sauntered off with an air of innocence, with me happy with my first two tests of the heart urchin Micraster safely wrapped up in my bag. A happy day, indeed, but old quarries were not always welcoming sites for the collector even then.

The purpose of this preamble is to emphasise how the search for fossils and fossiliferous localities has changed as we look back from the perspective of the 2020s. In the 1940s and 1950s, collecting inland was relatively straight forward; there were numerous quarries, both working and disused. By the mid-1970s, these were disappearing, a trend that continues to the present day.

Such is the state of quarrying in the UK that we import stone from overseas that was formerly sourced locally (Nield, 2014). Today, it is common for geologists to access disused quarries, such as those preserved as Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs), rather than working pits that may be exposing new rocks and new information. Some road cuttings through fossiliferous rocks are accessible and safe if exploited sensibly. Similarly, the cuttings of disused railways may be productive if collected with care (such as Tracey et al., 2002).

There may be river exposures, too. But, as the old song says, things ain’t what they used to be. In the 2020s, the best place to practice field palaeontology in the UK is on the coast. So, I have written a collectors guide to the seashore, Fossils on the Seashore: Beachcombing and Palaeontology (Donovan, 2025).

I admit that my early favourite localities were on the coast, at sites such as Copt Point, Folkestone, Kent, and the Naze peninsula, Walton-on-the-Naze, Essex. Beaches can be a draw in themselves, with fossils reworked in cobbles and pebbles. And there are recent shells on any beach. They are interesting in themselves, yet preserving features that inform our studies of classification, palaeoecology, taphonomy of fossils and trace fossils, such as encrusting organisms, borings and signs of predation. There is so much potential for you to make discoveries, and to expand your knowledge and experience. On the beach, we can truly use the present as the key to our fossil past.

If we take a suitably broad approach to palaeontology, any beach can be of relevance to our studies. If we wanted to be greedy, we might demand sites with in situ fossiliferous rocks, fossils in reworked beach clasts and interesting shells; But a recent field campaign was on the east coast of the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides (Donovan, 2023). The beaches, rich in igneous clasts, were a model for me to investigate the preservation of shells in a conglomeratic setting. Thus, a beach without fossils has informed my ideas of preservation and the fossil record.

So, what is the purpose of Fossils on the Seashore (Fig. 2)? I want to encourage all palaeontologists to get into the field. I imagine that this book will appeal mainly to amateurs and students, but I hope that there is something for everyone. There are many books on the seashore, but none has a palaeontological focus. Old favourites with beachcombers include Soper (1972) and, more recently, Plass (2013). More applicable are books about pebbles on the beach (such as Ellis, 1954; Mitchell, 2021) and seashells (many titles, such as Street, 2019).

References

Arkell, W.J. & 71 others. 1954. Directory of British Fossiliferous Localities. Palaeontographical Society, London.

Donovan, S.K. 2023.Notes on Aktuo-Paläontologie of the rocky beaches of the eastern Isle of Mull, UK. Scottish Journal of Geology, 59: 5 pp.

Donovan, S.K. 2025. Fossils on the Seashore: Beachcombing and Palaeontology. Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, xii+169 pp.

Ellis, C. 1954.The Pebbles on the Beach. Faber & Faber, London.

Mitchell, C. 2021.The Pebble Spotter’s Guide. National Trust Books, London.

Nield, Ted. 2014.Underlands: A Journey through Britain’s lost Landscape. Granta, London.

Plass, M. 2013.RSPB Handbook of the Seashore. Bloomsbury, London.

Soper, Tony. 1972.The Shell Book of Beachcombing. David & Charles, Newton Abbot.

Street, P. 2019.Shell Life on the Seashore. Faber & Faber, London.

Tracey, S., Donovan, S.K., Clements, D., Jeffery, P., Cooper, J., Rye, P. & Hensley, C. 2002. Temporary exposures of the Eocene London Clay Formation at Highgate, north London: rediscovery of a fossiliferous horizon ‘lost’ since the nineteenth century. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 113: 319–331.