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A friend of mine - who I met when we were neighbors - sent me a photo of some bones she found sticking out a cliff. She has just joined TFF @Jo Ludgate She wondered if they were Moa. I said yes! And thought it was interesting to find 2 bones together. Where she found them we usually find isolated bones. here’s the photo Jo sent me: There is one bone eroded out, and a toe bone still in the clay. Here they are cleaned up: Well I went back with Jo to see if there was more. We got there in the late evening as that’s when the tide was right. We had 3 hours to check it out. I was really suprised at the setting. It is at the base of a rock slide. The Siltstone has collapsed along a 100m stretch of beach and continues to “ooze” out into the beach and get nibbled at by the ocean. This looked to be a chunk of the Pleistocene deposits incorporated into that rock slide. A miracle that it survived! I carefully dig further into the clay, then saw nothing. I was about to give up and I hit bone after 15 mins!!! in the fading light we saw more and more bone!!! So hard to tell what is bone and the clay is so sticky, like cream cheese! well we had to call it quits and go back the next day. Luckily, the tide hadn’t gotten into the cover we out over our dig and we managed to delineate the bone cluster, pedestal it and extract it as a block. Not enough to have the entire bird, but loads of bones in there. Sorry not much to see as it’s really hard to clean the bones in that sticky clay. Bonus was what looks like fish bones that we got out to the right of the spade. Originally thought it was the continuation of the Moa skeleton.

I've just come back from a trip to Yorkshire where I managed to do a little fossil hunting and was lucky enough to find this ammonite. The problem is though is that generally the preservation in the area wasn't great and this one is clearly covered in a mudstone/ shale type of rock. However I think it might be worth trying to remove the surrounding rock because the small bit which I can see seems to have preserved fairly well. However I don't know the best way to remove it, see i'm not very comfortable with chiseling it away because I'm fairly new to this so would probably end up ruining it! I've been told that it may work if I was to put it into the oven to warm it up and then put it into cold water which could 'shock' the fossil to break along lines of weakness but I'm not sure if it would work or not. I've tried to post a picture of the fossil here but I'm not sure if its worked so if not here's a link: http://s1069.photobucket.com/user/zozzy-zebra/media/IMG_0003_zps69eb4cbf.jpg.html Any suggestions of how I can remove my ammonite would be greatly appreciated. Thanks