As much as we love British beaches, sometimes all sorts of unlikely things can wash up on them. Over the years, beachgoers have found all kinds of weird and wonderful items on our shores, and one man was left bowled over by a recent seaside discovery.
Liam, known as forgottenfossils on TikTok, said the ocean “tried to keep a secret”, but he managed to uncover something pretty cool at a beach in Whitby, England. He documented the find in a recent video, and he had the surprise of his life when he uncovered it wasn’t actually the “huge rock” he initially thought it was.
The social media user spends a lot of time exploring his local beach, and he’s made some brilliant finds. Not to mention, lots of people rave about the quality of the beach in Whitby too.
In a clip shared online, Liam wrote: “I thought this was just another rock. Turns out it’s a time capsule from the Jurassic period.
“It must have been in the beach system for years. Two well-preserved Ammonites hidden within.”
The video has been viewed hundreds of times since it was shared, with people clearly stunned by the epic discovery. If you don’t know what Ammonoids are they are extinct (usually) coiled-shelled cephalopods comprising the subclass Ammonoidea.
They are generally more closely related to living octopuses, squid and cuttlefish (which comprise the clade Coleoidea) than they are to nautiluses (family Nautilidae). It’s thought they first appeared during the Emsian stage of the Early Devonian (410.62 million years ago), and the last species disappeared during or soon after the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event (66 million years ago).
More often than not, they are referred to as ammonites, which is the name usually used to refer to members of the order Ammonitida. This is the only remaining group of ammonoids known from the Jurassic up until their extinction.
Over their history, Ammonoids have been quite diverse, with over 10,000 species having been described. They are considered to be excellent index fossils.
Usually, the fossil shells take the form of planispirals, but some helically spiraled and nonspiraled forms (known as heteromorphs) have also been uncovered in the past, mostly during the Cretaceous period.
According to the Natural History Museum, Ammonites were shelled cephalopods that died out about 66 million years ago. Fossils of them can be discovered all around the world, sometimes in “very large concentrations.”
“Ammonites are extinct shelled cephalopods. All of them had a chambered shell that they used for buoyancy,” explained Zoë Hughes, the museum’s Curator of Fossil Invertebrates.
Cephalopods – members of the Cephalopoda group – are separated into three subgroups. These are known as coleoids, which includes squids, octopuses and cuttlefishes, nautiloids and ammonites.
“Some of their morphology was closer to that of the coleoid group,” added Zoë. “We think it’s more likely that ammonites would have had eight arms rather than lots of tentacles like a nautilus, though the shell is more similar to that of a nautilus.
“The ammonite would have lived in one chamber, but we don’t know how often they built a new one. Previously it’s been suggested this could have been a monthly occurrence, but there’s no evidence for that.
“Some studies looking at the chemical composition of the shells – a field called sclerochronology – are starting to gain some insight of how long ammonites might have lived.”
