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Hi everyone! Today, a friend of mine from the Paleontology course at the University of Bristol and I went fossil hunting at the beach of Portishead, as we had heard it was an interesting and productive location. We were fairly confident that we would come home with at least some crinoid pieces, as these were meant to be rather abundant, but our real goal was to hopefully find some of the elusive eurypterid remains. It was about half an hour bus ride from the center of Bristol to Portishead, so it's relatively quick and easy for us to get there. It didn't take too long for us find our first few crinoid pieces in the rubble on the beach, and my friend managed to find a couple of decent spiriferid brachiopods by splitting some small rocks open. Unfortunately, it started to rain quite quickly, and after about an hour of searching the rain we decided to call it a day... so we didn't hunt for very long at all and hence didn't make any impressive finds. We didn't see any traces of fishes or eurypterids either which was a little disappointing, although also somewhat expected. Wishing to escape the rain, we found a little restaurant where we could sit inside and get a warm lunch, and afterwards we decided to just go back home as we were both tired, despite the very short hunt. So in terms of finds, we weren't very successful, but I did manage to snap some nice photos from the location. The geology of the place was really crazy and kind of all over the place, as you can see from the pictures here. Really interesting! We haven't yet covered this topic in my Geology course, but I suspect we will do that sometime soon, and then I will probably be more knowledgeable about what we're seeing actually means. But for now you'll still have to stick with my very amateur descriptions (stratigraphy can be a little complicated for a Pleistocene hunter as myself! ) This is the northern end of the location, Battery Point, where we are looking at several layers of the Portishead Formation. This is a Tournaisian-aged (Mississipian, early Carboniferous, approx 350 million years old) formation that is very rich in crinoids and corals. What's interesting to note is that the layers are not straight, but sit at approximately 30 degrees upwards. But that's pretty mild compared to the Devonian layers (as you will see a bit later). (Continued)