A 9-year-old child who was walking on a beach in Llantwit Major, Wales (United Kingdom) on Sunday made a discovery that he is not likely to forget anytime soon. Eli was with his parents when his eye was drawn to a shape spotted on a rock. It looked like a shell but had a surprising appearance. For good reason, it was actually a mollusc fossil of about thirty centimeters, says the BBC.
A vestige of the Jurassic era
Accustomed to fossils, of which he has a collection at home, Eli quickly understood what kind of training he was dealing with. However, he had never seen a mollusc fossil, called ammonite, of such a large size. Its discovery was all the more interesting because the object is actually some 200 million years old and dates from the Jurassic era.
Nick Felstead, a specialist in physical geography, found the presence of fossilized ammonite on the Welsh beach surprising. The expert also insisted on the rare nature of the remains of the mollusc close to octopus, squid and cuttlefish. The fossil "reveals the internal compartments that ammonite used to float and that were filled with quartz during fossilization, which is even less frequent," commented the academic.
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- Wales
- United Kingdom
- Palaeontology