Rainy hunt in Portishead UK

[Max-fossils]

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)

[Max-fossils]

These in-situ pictures are slightly hazy (they were taken with my old iPhone 6 under the rain... so I don't think it gets much better than this unfortunately), but good enough to easily distinguish multiple crinoid segments and coral pieces inside the layers. As Portishead is registered as an SSSI site, it is not allowed to hammer away at these layers to extract the criniods from them, however you are allowed to pick up the loose specimens and rocks (there are quite a lot). 

 

Here's a quick idea of what the view was like. As you can see, the weather really wasn't great  

 

[Tidgy's Dad]

Hi, Max! 

Nice report.

I lived in Portishead for a couple of years with my girlfriend at the time. 

Never found any eurypterids, though. Just the usual stuff. 

[Max-fossils]

Yeah... lots of rain. Not fun. It's a bit hard to see on the picture, but the small red cliffs (center-left of the photo, just after the artificial stone structures) are the Devonian layers where we normally find the eurypterid and fish stuff. So that's where we decided to go. 

 

These vibrant red layers are from the Black Nore Sandstone, which is from the Famennian stage of the Upper Devonian (approx 360-70 mya), so just a bit older than the Portishead Formation. 

 

As you can tell, these layers have been subject to a lot of transformation... look at those crazy angles between them! Really impressive to see this, and interesting to think of the force it must've taken to "bend" these layers this dramatically. 

 

[Max-fossils]

Check out this one, at 90 degrees! I'd never seen something quite like it.

 

Here the layers are just a complete mess... Despite not finding much in the way of fossils, I did very much enjoy seeing these layers completely jumbled up like that at crazy orientations. 

 

For those of you less interested in the geology side of things, let's go back to fossils with some more in-situ pictures, this time of some Devonian crinoids  

[Max-fossils]

To wrap things up I'll show you guys my rather meager haul of the day. Mainly just random crinoid pieces. Nothing very exciting, but I guess that for an hour hunting in the rain it's not that bad. The two pieces on the right (with red matrix) are from the Black Nore Sandstone, the rest should be from the Portishead Formation.

 

This is probably my favorite piece as it has the best preservation and nicest crinoids. 

 

But I do quite like this one too, pretty cool to see them like this. 

 

So yeah, I guess that for our first time we didn't do terrible, but it wasn't vastly successful either. Of course, the rain and the shortness of our hunt probably played a big part in that, although I also think that we were slightly underprepared as neither of us knew what the best techniques were to uncover the eurypterid or fish remains (which meant we barely actually searched for them). I'm sure someone here at the university has some more experience with the location, so I'll ask around for some tips and hopefully we will be better prepared next time. Despite the rain and not-so-fantastic hunt, I did still very much enjoy looking at the Geology of the place and can't wait to learn more about it. Due to COVID-19, many of our field trips for the course have been canceled, so it is nice to be able to get a little bit of a taster like this. 

 

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed reading this report, and thank you for reading till the end!

 

Happy hunting,

 

Max

[Max-fossils]

22 minutes ago, Tidgy's Dad said:

Hi, Max! 

Nice report.

I lived in Portishead for a couple of years with my girlfriend at the time. 

Never found any eurypterids, though. Just the usual stuff. 

Thanks Adam! I hope that the "usual stuff" is still slightly better than what I found today? Any fish remains? I'd love to see some of your better finds from the location  

[Tidgy's Dad]

1 hour ago, Max-fossils said:

Thanks Adam! I hope that the "usual stuff" is still slightly better than what I found today? Any fish remains? I'd love to see some of your better finds from the location  

Never found anything particularly outstanding there, but only looked a few times. I'll see if i can find some bits and get pictures. But very ordinary.

Nearest I found Devonian fish bits was Lydney, and they were only fragments.