Geology museums of Britain: Hastings Museum & Art Gallery and a window into the Wealden world
Jon Trevelyan (UK)
A museum built on fossils
Hastings is usually associated with history rather than prehistory. Its name is inseparable from 1066, while its fishing beach, old town and cliffs are familiar features of the modern resort. Yet the rocks beneath and around the town preserve evidence of a much older Hastings – a landscape of rivers, floodplains and lakes inhabited by dinosaurs, crocodilians, fishes and numerous smaller animals around 140 million years ago.
Some of that evidence can be seen in Hastings Museum & Art Gallery (Fig. 1). The museum occupies a substantial red-brick building in John’s Place, constructed in 1923 as a private house and opened as a museum in 1928. Its collections are extremely varied, ranging from local history and archaeology to ethnography, natural history and fine art. Within them, however, is a fossil collection with particularly strong links to the geology of Hastings and the surrounding district.
The fossils provide a useful starting point for exploring the geology outside the museum. Cliffs, foreshore exposures and former quarries around Hastings reveal rocks belonging to the Early Cretaceous Wealden succession. These accumulated predominantly in continental, rather than open-marine environments, as rivers migrated across low-lying floodplains and sand, silt and mud accumulated in channels, ponds and other bodies of water.
The resulting fossil record is much more than a collection of dinosaur bones. It includes footprints, crocodilian remains, fishes and sharks, molluscs, insects and plants, together with evidence of behaviour and environment. Tooth marks record scavenging, coprolites digestion and charcoal wildfire, while ripple marks preserve the movement of water across loose sediment. These very different traces can be combined to reconstruct something of the landscape in which the dinosaurs lived.
There is a human story as well. Fossils from the Hastings district have been collected for more than a century, and the museum preserves material associated with figures including Samuel Husband Beckles, Philip James Rufford, Edward John Baily and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Their work, together with more recent discoveries, provides another thread that we will follow through the article.
The museum is therefore our starting point rather than the whole subject. Its fossils lead us out into the surrounding rocks and back into the Early Cretaceous landscape from which they came. To understand what they tell us, we first need to look more closely at the Wealden world.
The Wealden world
To understand the fossils from Hastings, it is necessary to forget the modern Sussex coast. Around 140 million years ago, there was no English Channel and no line of sea cliffs. Instead, this part of southern England lay within a broad, low-lying landscape, crossed by rivers and containing floodplains, ponds, lakes and wetlands.
The rocks recording that landscape form part of the Early Cretaceous Wealden succession. Around Hastings, important exposures belong to the Hastings Beds and include the Ashdown Formation, Wadhurst Clay Formation and Tunbridge Wells Sand Formation. Much of the succession accumulated in continental and freshwater environments. Rivers shifted across their floodplains, sometimes cutting into earlier deposits, and at other times laying down sand, while finer sediment accumulated in quieter water and across flooded low ground.
The result was a constantly changing landscape, rather than a single stable environment. A river channel might occupy a site for a time before migrating elsewhere, leaving behind an abandoned channel, pond or muddy floodplain. Flooding could then bury an exposed surface beneath a new layer of sediment. Fig. 2 provides a reconstruction of this broader setting.
Vegetation included conifers, ferns and other plants, while the waterways supported fishes, sharks, molluscs and crocodilians. Dinosaurs ranged across the surrounding land, and insects occupied the vegetation and decaying wood. Fossil charcoal shows that fire also affected the landscape, demonstrating that conditions were not uniformly wet.
| What was the Wealden? |
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| The word ‘Wealden’ is used for a thick succession of Early Cretaceous rocks exposed across parts of south-east England, particularly in Sussex, Kent and the Isle of Wight. Unlike the marine limestones and clays that make up so much of Britain’s Mesozoic geological record, the Wealden rocks were deposited predominantly in rivers, lakes, lagoons, floodplains and other continental environments. Around 140 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous, southern England looked very different from today. Britain lay at a lower latitude and experienced a generally warm climate. Rivers crossed a broad, low-lying landscape carrying sand, silt and mud into channels, floodplains and bodies of standing water. Vegetation grew abundantly, while dinosaurs, crocodilians, turtles, fishes, sharks, insects and many other animals occupied the resulting mosaic of habitats. Conditions changed repeatedly. River channels migrated across their floodplains, lakes expanded and contracted, and floods spread sediment across low-lying ground. Sands accumulated where currents were relatively strong, while finer silts and clays settled in quieter water. It is this repeated alternation of environments that produced the varied rocks now exposed around Hastings. The term Wealden does not refer to a single rock formation. It encompasses a substantial succession of strata deposited over millions of years. Around Hastings, important exposures belong to the Hastings Beds, including rocks traditionally divided into units, such as the Ashdown Formation, Wadhurst Clay Formation and Tunbridge Wells Sand Formation. Their importance lies partly in what they preserve. Because these sediments accumulated on land and in freshwater settings, their fossils provide an unusually detailed record of Early Cretaceous terrestrial life. Dinosaur bones and footprints may attract most attention, but fossil plants, insects, fishes, freshwater molluscs, charcoal, coprolites and even sedimentary structures, such as ripple marks, all contribute to the story. Therefore, the cliffs, quarries and foreshore around Hastings preserve a fragmentary but remarkably varied record of an Early Cretaceous landscape that existed long before the English Channel, the modern coastline or Hastings itself. |
From sediment to rock
The changing environments also explain the variety of rocks. Flowing water deposited sand in river channels, sometimes producing cross-bedding, as sediment moved across the channel floor. Finer silt and mud settled where water was quieter, including on floodplains and in ponds and abandoned channels. As channels repeatedly migrated, these different deposits accumulated above and alongside one another.
This process is summarised in Fig. 3, which also shows why fossils from the same broad environment could be preserved in very different ways.
A fish settling into the fine sediment of a pond followed a very different route into the fossil record from a dinosaur bone lying on a floodplain. Footprints required another fortunate sequence: an animal had to cross sediment capable of retaining an impression, and the track then had to be buried before erosion, trampling or drying destroyed it. Only a tiny proportion of the organisms and traces produced in the Wealden landscape therefore survived.
The same is true of sedimentary structures. The fossil ripple marks displayed in the museum (Fig. 4) preserve the movement of water across loose sediment, rather than an organism, capturing one small part of the river system itself.
The Wealden fossil record is therefore not simply an inventory of its animals and plants. What survived depended upon where an organism lived and died, what happened to its remains, and whether they were buried under conditions favourable to preservation. A bone, fish, footprint or piece of fossil wood may each record a different aspect of the same landscape.
The next step is to combine those different clues and see how much of that vanished landscape can be reconstructed.
Reconstructing a vanished landscape
Once the sedimentary setting is understood, individual fossils can be used to put life back into the Wealden landscape. Dinosaur bones provide some of the most conspicuous evidence, but plants, insects and traces of fire can tell us just as much about the environment in which those dinosaurs lived.
Plants, insects and dead wood
Plants are fundamental to any reconstruction of a terrestrial environment. A fossil conifer cone collected by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Fig. 5) provides direct evidence of the vegetation growing around the Early Cretaceous rivers and floodplains.
Plants can also preserve evidence of animals that interacted with them. Fossil wood collected by Philip J Rufford contains beetle-grub borings (Fig. 6). The beetle larvae themselves are absent: what survives is the trace of their feeding within the wood.
Actual fossil beetles also occur. Specimens collected by Teilhard de Chardin have not been formally assigned scientific species names, although the museum notes similarities with modern forms that act as pollinators or recycle decaying organic material (Fig. 7). Whatever their precise ecological roles, they remind us that the Wealden ecosystem included innumerable small animals as well as its much more conspicuous vertebrates.
Fire on the floodplain
The vegetation did not always survive long enough to decay naturally. Dark fragments within another specimen are fossil charcoal (Fig. 8), demonstrating that wildfire occurred on the Early Cretaceous landscape.
Together, the cone, beetles, feeding traces and charcoal begin to populate the background landscape shown in Fig. 2. They reveal vegetation, insects living within or around it and episodes during which some of that vegetation burned.
| Reconstructing a vanished landscape |
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| How can geologists reconstruct an environment that disappeared around 140 million years ago? No single fossil provides the answer. Instead, the Early Cretaceous landscape around Hastings emerges by combining many different kinds of evidence – including evidence that at first sight may seem rather unimpressive. The rocks themselves provide the starting point. Sandstones can preserve structures produced by flowing water, while finer mudstones record quieter conditions in floodplains, ponds and lakes. Ripple marks reveal the movement of water across sediment. Changes in grain size and sedimentary structures allow geologists to recognise former river channels, floodplain deposits and other environments. Fossils then add the inhabitants. Plant remains show that vegetation grew around these rivers and wetlands. Cones and other conifer remains provide evidence of the trees themselves, while fragments of fossil charcoal reveal something more dramatic: vegetation sometimes burned. Wildfires were therefore part of the Cretaceous environment. Animal fossils add further detail. Freshwater molluscs, fishes and sharks demonstrate the presence of aquatic habitats. Insects reveal some of the much smaller organisms sharing the landscape. Dinosaur bones tell us which large vertebrates were present, while footprints record animals actually moving across exposed sediment. Some fossils preserve behaviour rather than bodies. Egg cases show reproduction; tooth marks can record scavenging; coprolites preserve evidence of feeding and digestion; and gastroliths may provide evidence of stones deliberately swallowed to help process food. Even the condition of a fossil can matter. A weathered bone may have lain exposed before burial, while an abraded specimen may have been transported by water. A concentration of broken bones can tell a very different story from an articulated skeleton. The result is rather like reconstructing a crime scene from scattered clues. Each piece of evidence is incomplete, and some interpretations remain uncertain. Taken together, however, the rocks, fossils and trace fossils allow a surprisingly detailed picture to emerge of the rivers, wetlands, vegetation and animals of Early Cretaceous Hastings. |
One unusually complete fossil shows how much can sometimes survive. The so-called ‘mummified fish’ (Fig. 9), discovered by Rod and Sue Lavers, preserves extensive scales and skeletal material. The museum suggests that the fish may have buried itself in sediment to aestivate during a period of drought, perhaps contributing to its unusual preservation, although this remains an interpretation, rather than something demonstrated directly by the fossil.
The interpretation also illustrates an important limitation. Fossils preserve only part of a sequence of events involving life, death, decay and burial, and explanations must remain consistent with what the evidence actually demonstrates. That caution will apply repeatedly as we turn from reconstructing the environment, to some of its most conspicuous inhabitants – the dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs beside the Cretaceous rivers
Dinosaurs provide some of the most conspicuous evidence of life in the Hastings Wealden. Bones reveal something of their anatomy, while footprints record living animals moving across the landscape. Other specimens preserve what happened after death. Together, they provide several different glimpses of dinosaurs inhabiting the river and floodplain environments described in the preceding sections.
One of the largest dinosaur bones on display is the proximal end of a right tibia – the upper part of the shin bone – from a large theropod (Fig. 10). The museum attributes it to an allosauroid theropod and suggests that it may belong to Becklespinax altispinax. It was collected by Samuel Husband Beckles, whose role in the early investigation of the Hastings dinosaurs is considered below.
Much smaller bones can also be informative. Figure 11 shows the terminal bone of a dinosaur finger – an ungual phalanx. In life, the bone would have supported a larger keratinous sheath forming the claw, rather as the ends of our fingers support fingernails.
A carcass on the floodplain
An isolated bone may preserve more than anatomy. The specimen in Fig. 12 bears tooth marks interpreted as evidence of scavenging, while cracking of its surface suggests that it remained exposed to weathering before burial. It therefore records something of the history of a carcass between death and its eventual entry into the sediment.
Such evidence is useful because the Wealden dinosaur record is often fragmentary. Carcasses could be scavenged, weathered or disarticulated, while individual bones might be transported before burial. Damage to a bone can therefore sometimes tell us about events that an undisturbed specimen cannot.
Dinosaurs that left no bones
Hastings is particularly notable for dinosaur footprints. Unlike bones, these record animals while they were alive and moving across the Early Cretaceous landscape.
One of the most imposing examples is a replica of a trackway discovered on the coast east of Hastings (Fig. 13). More than two metres high when mounted vertically, it preserves a succession of three-toed tracks attributed to an iguanodontian dinosaur.
Another enormous three-toed footprint gives an immediate impression of the size of some of the animals crossing these floodplains (Fig. 14).
However, the trackmakers were not all giants. Among the smallest dinosaur footprints known from Hastings are the tiny three-toed tracks shown in Fig. 15, made by a theropod probably no larger than a pigeon. Their diminutive size provides a striking contrast with the much larger tracks elsewhere in the Hastings record.
Together, these tracks record dinosaurs of very different sizes crossing the soft sediment of the Wealden landscape. Only a tiny proportion of their footprints survived, but those that did preserve evidence that skeletal remains alone cannot provide.
Samuel Beckles and the Hastings dinosaurs
The history of these discoveries is closely associated with Samuel Husband Beckles, whose specimens link the dinosaurs of the Wealden with the nineteenth-century investigation of the rocks around Hastings.
| Samuel Beckles and the dinosaurs of Hastings |
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| Samuel Husband Beckles (1814–1890) was not originally a professional geologist. A barrister by training, he retired to St Leonards in 1845 and developed a serious interest in natural history and, particularly, geology. The rocks around Hastings provided an exceptional field laboratory. At the time, dinosaurs were still a relatively new scientific discovery. The word Dinosauria itself had been coined by Richard Owen only in 1842. Beckles became one of the people investigating the fragmentary evidence emerging from the Wealden rocks of Sussex. He was particularly associated with the recognition of large, bird-like footprints in the rocks around Hastings as the tracks of dinosaurs. Such discoveries were important because footprints provided a rather different kind of evidence from bones. They showed that living animals had actually walked across the soft sediment that eventually became rock and could reveal aspects of posture and movement that isolated bones could not. Beckles’ interests extended far beyond footprints. He collected dinosaur bones and other fossils and undertook major excavations in Wealden rocks. His work helped establish the extraordinary richness of the Early Cretaceous vertebrate fauna of southern England. His scientific standing was recognised during his lifetime: in 1859 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Beckles also became part of the history of Hastings Museum itself. Following his death, a substantial portion of his fossil collection was purchased at auction by the Hastings and St Leonards Museums Association. Dinosaur bones and other specimens collected by him consequently survive in the museum today. A fossil on display can therefore record two histories: that of the animal that lived millions of years ago and that of the people who later discovered, interpreted and preserved its remains. In Beckles’ specimens, the beginnings of dinosaur research around Hastings and the beginnings of the museum’s fossil collection are closely intertwined. |
Beckles’ work is a reminder that familiar interpretations were themselves discoveries. Today, recognising a large three-toed impression as a dinosaur footprint may seem straightforward. Nineteenth-century investigators had first to establish what these unfamiliar structures represented.
The Hastings dinosaurs are therefore known through both body fossils and traces: bones and claws record the animals themselves, while footprints preserve brief moments when they crossed the Wealden landscape. But dinosaurs were only part of that landscape. Its rivers, ponds and lakes supported an aquatic fauna of fishes, sharks, crocodilians and molluscs, to which we turn next.
Sharks, fishes and life in the water
Dinosaurs may provide the most conspicuous evidence of life in Early Cretaceous Hastings, but water was fundamental to the Wealden landscape. Rivers, ponds, lakes and abandoned channels supported a varied aquatic fauna, including fishes, sharks, crocodilians and molluscs. A selection is brought together in Fig. 16.
Freshwater sharks
Perhaps the most surprising inhabitants were sharks. Hybodonts were an extinct group of shark-like cartilaginous fishes, and the Hastings material includes some of their characteristic fin spines. One specimen consists of a rare pair (Fig. 17).
Because sharks possessed predominantly cartilaginous skeletons, resistant structures such as teeth and fin spines, had a much better chance of fossilisation than much of the rest of the animal. The Hastings material, however, includes something quite different: fossilised egg cases attributed to Hybodus (Fig. 18). Rather than preserving part of the shark itself, these record reproductive activity.
The contrast between the fin spines and egg cases neatly illustrates the different information fossils can provide: one records part of an animal’s body, while the other preserves evidence of its behaviour.
Bony fishes were another component of the aquatic fauna. The displays include Lepidotus, a heavily scaled fish represented by resistant remains that could become separated and scattered after death. More complete preservation was possible under favourable circumstances, as demonstrated by the ‘mummified fish’ already encountered in Fig. 9 (above).
Fishes of the rivers and lakes
The museum suggests that this fish may have buried itself in sediment while aestivating during a drought. As noted earlier, that interpretation remains tentative, but it raises an important point about the environment. The bodies of water scattered across the floodplain were not necessarily permanent. Channels shifted and ponds could contract or disappear as conditions changed.
Crocodilians
Crocodilians occupied the waterways and their margins. The remains of a juvenile collected by Edward J Baily (Fig. 19) include bones and numerous dermal scutes – the bony plates that formed part of its protective covering.
Together with the fishes, sharks and molluscs, such remains populate the rivers and other bodies of water reconstructed in Fig. 2 (above). They also emphasise that the terrestrial and aquatic parts of the Wealden landscape cannot really be separated. Rivers carried plant debris and sediment from the surrounding land; dinosaurs crossed muddy channel margins; and floods could move carcasses, bones and other organic material between environments.
Small fossils, larger implications
Freshwater bivalves and gastropods may be less conspicuous than dinosaur bones or crocodilian remains, but they add to the evidence for the freshwater environments represented by the Hastings succession. Along with Lepidotus, hybodont sharks and crocodilians, they show that the waterways were habitats in their own right, rather than simply channels through which sediment passed.
Some of these aquatic fossils also preserve more than the presence of an animal. The Hybodus egg cases record reproduction, just as dinosaur footprints record movement and tooth marks can record scavenging. Fossils of this kind take us beyond identifying the inhabitants of the Wealden landscape and allow glimpses of what they were actually doing.
That behavioural evidence is the subject of the next section.
Fossil behaviour: tracks, eggs, stomach stones and dung
Bones and shells tell us which animals were present in the Wealden landscape, but some fossils preserve something more immediate: evidence of what those animals were doing. Footprints record movement, egg cases reproduction, tooth marks feeding or scavenging, while coprolites and gastroliths provide clues to digestion.
Several examples have already appeared. The dinosaur trackway in Fig. 13 (above) records an iguanodontian walking across soft sediment, while the tiny theropod footprints in Fig. 15 (above) capture the passage of a much smaller animal. The Hybodus egg cases in Fig. 18 (above) are interpreted as evidence of reproduction, and the tooth marks on the dinosaur bone in Fig. 12 (above) record scavenging after death. Even the beetle-grub borings in Fig. 6 (above) preserve an activity – larvae feeding within wood – rather than the animals themselves.
These traces are valuable precisely because they complement body fossils. A dinosaur bone establishes that an animal was present, but a footprint records it moving through a particular environment. A shark fin spine records the animal itself; an egg case records part of its life cycle. Together, body fossils and traces provide different kinds of evidence about the same ecosystem.
Evidence from digestion
Among the less glamorous but particularly informative fossils are coprolites – fossilised faeces. The specimens in Fig. 20 were collected by Edward J Baily and are displayed alongside gastroliths, stones interpreted as having been swallowed by animals and retained within the digestive system.
Coprolites can potentially preserve fragments of food that passed through an animal’s digestive system. They therefore record a biological process, rather than simply the presence of the animal that produced them. Gastroliths provide another kind of evidence, relating to the processing of food within the digestive system.
Moments preserved in stone
There is an important difference between reconstructing an animal from its bones and reconstructing its behaviour. Behaviour is fleeting. A footprint might have existed for only a short time before being destroyed by another animal, drying, erosion or the next flood. An egg case could decay, and feeding marks might disappear with the destruction of the bone or wood on which they occurred. For such evidence to reach us, the trace first had to survive and then be buried and preserved.
That makes the surviving examples particularly evocative. The giant dinosaur footprint of Fig. 14 (above), the tiny tracks of Fig. 15 (above), the scavenged bone of Fig. 12 (above) and the Hybodus egg cases of Fig. 18 (above) are not simply records of organisms. Each preserves the result of an event that took place in the Early Cretaceous landscape.
Even the ripple marks in Fig. 4 (above) can be viewed in a similar way, although they are sedimentary structures rather than trace fossils. They preserve the action of flowing water across the bed of a Wealden river. The rocks around Hastings therefore record processes as well as organisms: animals walking and feeding, water moving sediment, and floods repeatedly burying the surfaces on which those events occurred.
Many of these fossils survived not only because of the circumstances of their burial, but because somebody later recognised and collected them. The next part of the story therefore concerns four people whose names recur throughout the Hastings collection and whose work helped preserve this evidence of the Wealden world.
Four collectors who built a collection
The fossils at Hastings Museum did not arrive there as a single collection assembled to illustrate the Wealden. They were accumulated over many decades by people with different backgrounds and interests. Four names in particular recur among the specimens: Samuel Husband Beckles, Philip James Rufford, Edward John Baily and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Their collections form an important part of the human history behind the fossils.
Samuel Husband Beckles
Samuel Husband Beckles (1814–1890) has already appeared in connection with the dinosaurs of Hastings. As described in Text box: Samuel Beckles and the dinosaurs of Hastings, he retired to St Leonards in 1845 and became closely involved in investigating the local Wealden rocks. He was particularly associated with the recognition of dinosaur footprints, although his collecting extended much further.
Following Beckles’ death, a substantial part of his collection was purchased by the Hastings and St Leonards Museums Association. Specimens such as the theropod tibia in Fig. 10 (above) consequently preserve a direct connection between the modern museum collection and some of the nineteenth-century investigation of the Hastings Wealden.
Philip James Rufford
Philip James Rufford (1852–1902) came to geology by a different route. A civil engineer by profession, he retired to Hastings at the age of 36 and became a keen geologist and natural historian. He served on the Museum Committee from 1893 until his death in 1902 and was involved in the acquisition of Beckles’ collection.
Rufford was particularly interested in fossil plants. He collected extensively along the coast between Rock-a-Nore and Cliff End/Fairlight, and many of his specimens came from the Fairlight Clays. His plant collection was eventually divided between Hastings and the British Museum (Natural History).
Yet, his surviving material also demonstrates the breadth of his collecting. The beetle-grub borings in fossil wood shown in Fig.6 (above) and the Hybodus egg cases in Fig. 18 (above) were both collected by Rufford. The first records insects feeding within vegetation; the second preserves evidence associated with reproduction in an aquatic animal. The two specimens could hardly be more different, but both contribute to reconstructing the Wealden environment.
Edward John Baily
Edward John Baily (1859–1939) was a brewery owner, as well as a fossil collector. Associated with Baily & Co Brewery in Battle, he moved to Bexhill in 1912 and assembled a collection of more than 650 specimens from localities including Hastings, Telham, Darwell Beach, Archer Wood and Higham near Robertsbridge. Black Horse Quarry was among the sites that proved particularly productive.
Baily’s careful labelling adds to the usefulness of his material, because a fossil whose locality is recorded can be related more readily to the rocks and environment from which it came. His specimens encountered in this article include the juvenile crocodilian in Fig 19 (above), the dinosaur ungual in Fig. 11 (above) and the coprolites and gastroliths in Fig. 20 (above).
These represent very different parts of the Wealden story – an aquatic predator, a dinosaur bone and evidence connected with digestion – and illustrate how a collection assembled by one person can encompass much more than a single fossil group.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The fourth collector is probably the most internationally familiar name. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) later became known as a Jesuit priest, philosopher, author and geologist, but his association with Hastings began while he was studying theology at Ore Place between 1908 and 1912.
Together with Félix Pelletier, Teilhard collected around 150 fossils from the district, which were donated to the museum in 1912. His Hastings specimens include the fossil beetles of Fig. 7 (above) and the conifer cone of Fig. 5 (above).
A much more personal object also survives. Teilhard’s tobacco box (Fig. 21) was presented to the museum by his brother Joseph in 1961. It is not, of course, a geological specimen, but it provides a tangible connection with the young man who collected fossils around Hastings, before his later career took him much further afield.
| Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: from Hastings to human evolution |
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| Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) is an unusual figure in the history of palaeontology: a Jesuit priest, geologist, palaeontologist, philosopher and writer, whose career ranged from collecting fossils on the Sussex coast to participating in some of the most important investigations of early human evolution in China. Born in France, Teilhard entered the Society of Jesus in 1899. Between 1908 and 1912 he studied theology at Ore Place, Hastings. The local Wealden rocks gave him abundant opportunities for geological fieldwork, and with Félix Pelletier, he assembled a collection of around 150 fossils that was donated to Hastings Museum in 1912. Teilhard was ordained a priest in 1911 and subsequently developed his geological and palaeontological career. His scientific interests eventually took him far beyond Sussex, particularly to China, where he participated in geological and palaeontological research associated with the discoveries at Zhoukoudian, the site famous for the remains historically known as Peking Man. His scientific work became closely intertwined with his philosophical and theological ideas. Teilhard attempted to understand evolution not simply as a biological process but as part of a much broader history of increasing complexity and consciousness. Some of his writings were controversial within the Catholic Church during his lifetime, and several of his major works were published only after his death. Whatever view is taken of those wider ideas, the Hastings fossils belong to a much earlier and more straightforward part of his career. They show a young geologist working directly with the rocks and fossils of the Wealden landscape. The conifer cone and fossil beetles preserved at Hastings, therefore, have an interest extending beyond the specimens themselves. They connect the local geology of Sussex with a scientist whose later career ranged across geology, palaeontology, human evolution, philosophy and theology. See also Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 to 1955): A geologist priest in Hastings, by Ken Brooks. |
More than four collectors
Beckles, Rufford, Baily and Teilhard provide four particularly useful threads through the collection, but they were not alone. More recent collectors have continued to add material. Philip T Hadland, for example, collected the tiny dinosaur tracks in Fig. 15 (above), the wildfire evidence in Fig. 8 (above) and the scavenged dinosaur bone in Fig. 12 (above), while Rod and Sue Lavers discovered the unusually preserved fish shown in Fig. 9 (above).
The collection has therefore grown through many separate acts of discovery rather than through a single collecting programme. What links much of the material is its geographical context: fossils found in and around Hastings and preserved with information about where they came from.
That local connection is particularly useful for this article. It allows specimens in one room of an otherwise eclectic museum to serve as a starting point for exploring the much larger geological story preserved in the rocks outside. Before drawing those threads together, however, a few displays take us beyond the Wealden itself.
Beyond the Wealden
The Wealden fossils are the focus of this article, but they occupy only part of the geology represented at Hastings Museum. The fossil displays themselves (Fig. 22) place the specimens within a broader local collection, while a few exhibits provide useful reminders that the geological history of the Hastings district did not end with the rivers and floodplains of the Early Cretaceous.
A younger Cretaceous sea
The Wealden rocks were deposited largely in continental and freshwater environments, but conditions in southern England subsequently changed dramatically. Later in the Cretaceous, rising sea levels flooded much of the region and marine sediments accumulated above the older Wealden succession.
An ammonite from the Chalk at Lewes (Fig. 23) represents this very different world. Instead of dinosaurs crossing river floodplains, the fossil records an animal that lived in the sea. The specimen therefore provides a useful contrast with the predominantly terrestrial and freshwater fossils that have occupied most of this article.
The modern distribution of the rocks reflects the long period of geological change and erosion that followed. Around Hastings, erosion has exposed the older Wealden strata, giving us access to the river and floodplain deposits – and their fossils – on which this article has concentrated.
Geology beyond fossils
Not every geological exhibit concerns ancient life. A display relating to gypsum mining at Brightling (Fig. 24 illustrates a much more recent human use of the rocks of Sussex. The equipment belongs to the history of mineral extraction, rather than palaeontology, but it broadens the geological story from reconstructing ancient environments to the ways in which people have used geological resources.
These displays are useful here principally as context. Hastings Museum is not solely a geological museum, and even its geological material extends beyond the Wealden fossils considered in the preceding sections. Our purpose has been narrower: to use one part of its varied collections as a way into the Early Cretaceous geology exposed around Hastings.
Seen in that way, the museum and the landscape complement one another. The specimens bring together evidence that is scattered through cliffs, foreshore exposures and former quarries, while the rocks outside provide the geological setting needed to understand those specimens. It is that connection between fossils, collectors and the local landscape that brings us back, finally, to the Wealden world.
Conclusion – a window into Cretaceous Hastings
Hastings Museum & Art Gallery is an eclectic museum, and its fossil displays occupy only one part of its collections. But, the specimens gathered there provide an excellent starting point for exploring a much larger subject: the Early Cretaceous landscape preserved in the rocks around Hastings.
That landscape was very different from the Sussex coast of today. Rivers migrated across broad floodplains, while ponds, lakes and wetlands occupied the lower ground. Conifers and other plants grew alongside the waterways, insects inhabited the vegetation and fishes, sharks and crocodilians lived in the water. Dinosaurs ranged across the surrounding land, sometimes leaving footprints in soft sediment that survived long after the animals themselves had disappeared.
Much of what makes the Wealden record so informative lies in the variety of the evidence. Bones and teeth identify some of its inhabitants, but fossil plants, insects and molluscs reveal less conspicuous parts of the ecosystem. Charcoal records wildfire; ripple marks flowing water; footprints movement; tooth marks scavenging; egg cases reproduction; and coprolites digestion. Each is only a fragment, but together they allow a much richer reconstruction than the spectacular dinosaur remains could provide on their own.
There is also a human history behind those fossils. Beckles, Rufford, Baily and Teilhard de Chardin collected at different times and for different reasons, while later collectors have continued to add specimens. Their discoveries have preserved material that might otherwise have been lost as cliffs eroded, temporary exposures disappeared and quarries closed.
That is perhaps the best way to approach the Hastings collection. It is not necessary to regard the museum itself as the subject of the whole story. Instead, its fossil gallery acts as a window through which we can look out onto the surrounding geology. The specimens lead us back to the cliffs, foreshore and former quarries, and from there still further back to the rivers and floodplains on which they originated.
For anyone exploring the geology of Hastings, the museum therefore provides a useful place to begin – but the greater museum lies outside, in the Wealden rocks themselves.
| About the museum |
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| Address: John’s Place, Bohemia Road, Hastings, East Sussex, TN34 1ET. Website: https://www.hmag.org.uk/ |