Bristol

Last week I went to Bristol Museum with two of my lecturers to collect some more samples for my project. When we got there we were taken down into the Geology Storage Room, which was really cool! It had loads of moveable shelves with loads of amazing fossils on them. I could have stayed there all day! We looked at the rocks that some of the Scelidosaurus dinosaurs bones have been found in, along with a couple of the bones themselves. We took two samples from one of the rocks to be taken away for a palynological study (dust and pollen) and contemplated stealing some really cool samples with loads of fossils in! Somehow I don't think we would have gotten away with it!

The rock that we sampled from

Cool rock with a belemnite to the right

Cool rock with lots of crinoids in

Cool rock with a few rip up clasts

So in the pictures above, you can see that there were belemnites, crinoids and rip up clasts. You may be wondering what they are, so I thought I'd give you a quick explanation of each one. Belemnites were squid like animals, that were long and tube shaped. They are now extinct. Crinoids are stalked animals that look a bit like plants, but are in fact related to starfish. Some are still alive today. Rip up clasts are small pieces of mudstone that get ripped up (hence the name!) when a strong current passes over them. They can be transported quite far, and will then be deposited along with the rest of the sediment that is being carried by the current.

We then went and had a look at the Scelidosaurus specimens that they had on show in Bristol museum. There were a few pieces that still had some skin attached, and they also had a really cool model of Scelidosaurus.

Scelidosaurus skin

Nearly complete adult Scelidosaurus

A model of Scelidosaurus