Hi All,
I'm trying to write something different from my usual, although that is quite varied already if you look at my short story as well as serials page. It's could run to a couple of parts or one longer story. I don't want to divulge too much about the outline but it should suit those who like a bit of action rather than vanilla tales of twelve-year-olds.
I have been very busy this week doing reptile and aquatic invertebrate surveys, my arthritis is giving me hell especially, in the knee and I'm off tomorrow on a geology field trip to Lyme Regis famous for the discovery of Ichthyosaurs and other oceanic fossils. It's also the birth place of Mary Anning, who was eventually recognised as one of the first woman palaeontologists. It's a world heritage site on the Jurassic coast. Parts of it are always swarming with fossil hunters, holidaymakers, because it is a beautiful beach resort, beloved of Jane Austen (part of Pride and Prejudice is based there) and also the place on which John Fowles based 'The French Lieutenant's Woman.' He lived there for a time and was a curator of the rather nice little museum there.
It's also rather hilly, so my poor knee is having a pre-emptive groan already. I hope to have something to post next week, but I think many of you will enjoy what I am trying to write - sometimes I have ideas I can't make materialise as a story, but I'll give it my best shot.
The attached link has several photos on it.
https://www.google.com/search?gs_ssp=eJzj4tTP1TcwTCowNzBg9OL...
Comments
Can
you park near the harbour? There is no easy way out of the place other than by sea! Have a good day and take it steady and i'm sure we'll all read whatever you deign to endow us with.
Madeline Anafrid Bell
Lyme
Was a favourite of my late partner, and I referenced it in 'Cold Feet' when Sar and Arris go to that first bike rally. It's also the place where I encountered the dessert BEYOND 'death by chocolate', 'mass murder by chocolate'.
We stayed there many times, walking out towards Seaton, and also stayed in the aptly-named village of Beer.
When I read 'oceanic fossil', I immediately got a vision of the yacht Morning Cloud and a certain former Prime Minister...
Staying at Beer..
Goodness that takes me back!
Family holidays in the late seventies and early eighties, taking our caravan to a small farm between Seaton and Beer.
If memory serves correctly, there was a pub with a beer garden, so three children (and two parents) could partake of the infamous "ploughman's lunch".
I remember fossil hunting at Lyme, too, (whilst my big sister was standing on the Cobb staring moodily out to sea, having read and eventually seen "The French Lieutenant' s Woman"). I actually found part of a trilobite, which annoyed my big brother, who found diddly squat.
Lucy xx
"Lately it occurs to me..
what a long strange trip its been."
Beer
The pub was the Anchor, which had a payphone indoors in an actual red telephone booth. It was also copiously fitted with fairground distorting mirrors.
Unlikely to be a trilobite at Lyme
That's all Jurassic and Trilobites were extinct by about 50M years by then after the great extinction in the Permian. Many of the trilobite fossils are actually shed skins not the entire animal.
Angharad
Molting
In the rare moments I stayed awake in my morning Biology class in university, I learned that trilobites were the first species to undergo the process of molting -- shedding their carapaces, often as much as two or three times a year. This and the subsequent disarticulation that occurred make up the vast majority of the trilobite fossils that have been discovered. I'm from New York and as a child on summer vacation with my family I once visited one of the best sites for trilobite and other Silurian fossils -- Ordovician Walcott–Rust quarry, near Russia, New York. My dad bought me a trilobite fossil from the shop there. I have no idea where it is now, almost five decades later.
Sammy
Fossils
What I remember finding round there are belemnites ('elf shot') and ammonites.