Whitby Fossils

One of the reasons I wanted to go to York with Rebecca was to take a day trip to Whitby and hunt for fossils.  The coast near Whitby was where some of the first dinosaur fossils were found.  If the theory of evolution has a home other than Darwin’s head it is Whitby.

We drove up from York across the Moors and parked near the Whitby visitor center. We went in to confirm that we wouldn’t get caught by the tide if we went fossil hunting and then we walked through the village and out onto the shingle.  I’m calling it the shingle because it sounds cool and exotic not because the usage is correct

We went looking along the cliffs and found nothing but some cool rocks and some flints.  We were about to give up and go back when we saw ammonites in the rock at our feet.

The pieces were too big to cut out but we looked around some more and I found a stone with a tiny shell print in it and Rebecca found a bigger one.  We walked back into town and stopped in a jewelry store that had some ammonites in the window and asked where we could buy some.  The owner sold us two right there for less than $10 each.  I’m counting them as a find in the biblical sense.

The jeweler guy goes out to the cliffs a lot looking for Jet a petrified wood that is made into black jewelry.  He implied that ammonites get in the way of Jet hunting.

To see a whole set of pictures of the expedition click here.