An acclaimed international collection of earth science articles and book reviews on palaeontology, geology, minerals and more
Jon Trevelyan (UK) Robert Westwood is no stranger to the pages of Deposits. Over the years, I have reviewed several of his geological guides, covering subjects ranging from the Jurassic Coast to Cornwall and the Lake District (ee below). What has always appealed to me about his publications is their … Read More
Jon Trevelyan (UK) Maidstone Museum and an unexpectedly substantial geology gallery Maidstone Museum is not primarily a geological museum. Its collections range across archaeology, natural history, fine and decorative art, costume, ethnography, and local history, with more than 600,000 objects in its care. Yet, tucked away on the first floor … Read More
This final part of the series brings together the two very different lake worlds explored so far. In Part 1, we reconstructed the long-lived Devonian lakes of the Orcadian Basin; in Part 2, we examined the short-lived but dramatic ice-dammed lakes of Glen Roy. Here, we broaden the view to consider the wider pattern of lost lakes across Britain – how they formed, how they drained, and how their influence persists in modern landscapes, particularly in the behaviour of rivers and the shape of valleys.
Jon Trevelyan (UK) There can be few places in Britain better suited to a geological field guide than the Isle of Wight. Its relatively small area contains an extraordinary range of rocks and fossils, while its eroding cliffs and beaches have produced discoveries ranging from ammonites and molluscs to plants, … Read More
Jon Trevelyan (UK) A geological museum in the heart of the Black Country Dudley is one of those places where geology is difficult to separate from almost everything that followed. The rocks beneath the town and the surrounding Black Country provided coal, ironstone, limestone and fireclay; their exploitation transformed the … Read More
When a Carboniferous swamp drowned, its towering lycopsids collapsed, its peat surface disappeared beneath mud, and the forest that had stood for decades, or at most a few generations, abruptly ceased to exist. Yet within surprisingly little time, new vegetation reclaimed the abandoned lake floor. The first wave of this recovery is written across the roof shales of the West Cumberland Coalfield district in thousands of beautifully preserved fronds, most commonly those of Pecopteris, the characteristic tree ferns of the Westphalian wetlands.
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 … Read More
Jon Trevelyan (UK) A museum unlike any other Perched above Scarborough’s South Bay, the Rotunda Museum occupies a unique place in the history of geology (Fig. 1). Opened in 1829, it is one of the world’s earliest purpose-built geological museums and remains one of Britain’s most historically significant centres for … Read More
Stephen K. Donovan (UK) One of the first volumes that I bought when I first took up palaeontology over 50 years ago was the very excellent Directory of British Fossiliferous Localities (Arkell et al., 1954; Donovan, 2025a), a tome full of meat. It was published in the same year as … Read More
Jon Trevelyan (UK) A landscape full of holes Grime’s Graves does not announce itself with the drama of a great cliff, cave or quarry. On a low Chalk ridge in the Breckland of Norfolk, the most immediately striking feature is instead the ground itself. Across the grassland are hundreds of … Read More
Jon Trevelyan (UK) A small museum with a remarkable geological story Tucked away behind the parish church in the centre of Cromer, Cromer Museum occupies a modest site that visitors could easily overlook. Entering through a modern reception building, the museum opens into a narrow courtyard surrounded by a terrace … Read More
Every coal seam in the West Cumberland Coalfield district records the accumulation of peat in a mature lycopsid swamp. But just as revealing as the coal itself is what lies immediately above it – the roof shales. These fine-grained sediments record the moment when the forest drowned, the swamp surface subsided or flooded, and a new ecological phase unfolded above the buried peat. In the West Cumberland Coalfield, roof shales are exceptionally well developed and preserve a full sequence of the events that followed each catastrophic rise in water level.
Jon Trevelyan (UK) This is the second in my series of short articles on fossils of the Ordovician. Among the many colonial organisms that chart the course of Ordovician seas, Didymograptus murchisoni remains one of the most recognisable. A key graptolite of the Middle Ordovician, it combines elegant morphology with … Read More
Jon Trevelyan (UK) Keswick Museum is not a geology museum in any conventional sense. There are no long stratigraphic runs of specimens, no systematic mineral displays, and no attempt to present geology as a complete discipline. Instead, visitors encounter a typically Victorian mixture of natural history, literature, local industry and … Read More
Jon Trevelyan (UK) Beneath Dudley Castle lies a landscape that began as a tropical Silurian sea and ended as one of the most intensively worked limestone systems in Britain. Around 425 million years ago, this part of the Midlands lay beneath a warm, shallow sea, building the reef limestone now … Read More
Jon Trevelyan (UK) The road over Honister Pass does not feel like a place for industry. It climbs abruptly into the high fells, threading between steep slopes and exposed rock faces, with little sense of the gentler, pastoral Lake District often presented in guidebooks. Yet, set into this harsh landscape … Read More
With the restoration of the Crystal Palace prehistoric sculptures and their remarkable Geological Court now virtually complete, it is perhaps worth asking why this unique Victorian landscape continues to command such scientific and historical importance. Why should geologists, palaeontologists and members of the public still make the journey to south London to see reconstructions that are now more than 170 years old and, in many respects, scientifically outdated?
The most visually arresting fossils from the West Cumberland Coalfield, indeed from almost any British Carboniferous site, are the great patterned slabs of lycopsid bark that, if you are lucky, can sometimes be found. Their surfaces carry unmistakable geometric signatures: the diamond-shaped leaf cushions of Lepidodendron or the vertical rows of elongated scars typical of Sigillaria.
The fossils described in this series formed during the Carboniferous Period, around 320 million years ago, when Britain lay close to the Equator. The above figure places the Carboniferous within Britain’s wider geological history. During this interval, extensive tropical wetlands covered much of the country, producing the peat deposits that would later become the coal seams of the West Cumberland Coalfield. This series explores one remarkable record of that vanished landscape.
A quiet valley at Grasmere holds clues to a landscape once buried beneath ice. By following those clues west to Langdale and then outward across the Lake District, a much larger story emerges – one of glaciers, ice sheets and landscape transformation.
Modern Britain lies far from active plate boundaries. It has no active volcanoes and experiences only minor earthquakes, and is often described as tectonically quiet. Yet its landscape is anything but passive. Hills and lowlands, coastlines and drainage patterns all reflect a deep structural inheritance established during earlier phases of continental collision, collapse and rifting.
Matthew Myerscough’s In Search of Sea Dragons: A Fossil Hunter’s Odyssey begins not with fossils, but with survival. Early in the book, Myerscough recounts how he and his future wife narrowly escaped death in an avalanche on Snowdon. The experience casts a long shadow over everything that follows. What initially appears to be a book about fossil hunting, gradually reveals itself as something rather more personal: a memoir about recovery, obsession, friendship and the strange hold that collecting can exert over people.
Heather Middleton, Mike Harvey and Steve Snowball (UK) This article describes a series of pliosaur remains recovered from the Lower Kimmeridge Clay Formation at Smallmouth Sands, Weymouth (Dorset). The material, collected as isolated elements from a single locality within the Rasenia cymodoce Biozone, includes cervical and caudal vertebrae, ribs and … Read More
By the end of the Carboniferous, Britain had already passed through more than one major phase of mountain building, each followed by long periods of erosion and structural collapse. The Caledonian mountains were long eroded, and the Variscan belt of southern Britain was entering its final stages of decay. Yet tectonic influence did not fade away. Instead, the dominant regime changed. Britain was no longer being compressed – it was being stretched.
The collision that assembled Britain at the end of the Silurian (see A history of the plate tectonics of Britain (part 1): Britain assembled – oceans, collisions and the making of a geological patchwork) did not mark the end of tectonic influence on the landscape. Instead, it marked the beginning of a new phase – one that is often less intuitively grasped, but just as important. Mountain belts are temporary features. Once continental collision ceases, thickened crust becomes gravitationally unstable. Erosion strips material from the surface, while extension and faulting affect the deep roots of the orogen. The geological record that follows is not one of rising peaks, but of collapse, subsidence and redistribution.
Steve Snowball (UK) This article is a response to a request by the editor of Deposits to write about my inspiration and reasons for writing a series of fossil collecting guides, the latest of which is A Field Guide to Collecting British Cenozoic Fossils, by myself and Alister Cruickshanks, and … Read More
Britain is often described as geologically quiet. There are no active volcanoes, no subduction zones, and only modest earthquakes. Yet, for its size, few countries display such a concentration of geological variety. Mountain uplands, volcanic terrains, deeply folded rocks, and ancient metamorphic cores all occur within a relatively small area. The explanation for this diversity lies not in Britain’s present tectonic setting, but in a long and complex tectonic history that assembled the country piece by piece from fragments that originated far apart.
Books devoted specifically to collecting Britain’s Cenozoic fossils are surprisingly rare. While collectors are well served by guides to the country’s Palaeozoic and Mesozoic fossils, the younger deposits that record the last 66 million years of Earth history have received far less attention. A Field Guide to Collecting British Cenozoic Fossils aims to address that gap by providing a practical introduction to the fossils and collecting sites associated with these deposits.
For much of the twentieth century, generations of students (and amateurs like me) learned a tidy, mid-Cretaceous succession for southern England:
Lower Greensand – Gault Clay – Upper Greensand – Chalk.
It appeared in every textbook, diagram and museum panel. There was an appealing symmetry to the sequence, with two sands bracketing the impervious Gault and the Chalk resting neatly above. It seemed so natural that few doubted it.
Robert J Williams (UK) To the north-east of London lies the county of Essex, which extends out to the east coast of England. Although not noted for its geology, it does have quite a bit to offer the amateur geologist. In addition, there is a significant body of published geological … Read More
