Old Fossils on Cocklawburn Beach 

On a sunny April day, too good to stay indoors, Mark, Graeme and Alistair Huskie took a trip to a local beach known for it's geology and found some very interesting fossils and things. Our first encounter was with a breathless police officer looking for a flasher who had been strutting his stuff on this warm spring day, that aside we moved on to a rocky outcrops in search of a less elusive prey.

 The beach has a layer of limestone rock laid down about 350 million years ago that is full of fossils. Among the most apparent fossils embedded in the rocks were the crinoids, members of the family Echinodermata, know today as sea lilies or feather stars.

Meeting a palaeobiology enthusiast, he showed us a neck and wrist band he had made from the fossilised segments of crinoids which he and his wife had collected on the beach. Knowledgeable about Cocklawburn Beach, he told us about some of the prize finds on the this shore including a 10 foot fossilised fish and what he described as probably the skeleton of a prehistoric crocodile. He was good enough to give us one of his finds, a free floating coral that he had found loose on the limestone rock outcrop we were standing on.

Crinoids were everywhere in the rocks, best seen when the rocks are wet many were so big you could see then easily on the dry surfaces. The presence of the crinoids and free corals suggested that these rocks and fossils were laid down in warmer water than the freezing cold North Sea. In fact, when this fossils were living creatures this part of the British isles was probably somewhere in the Middle East, moved here by continental shift over millions of years.

We also found some bivalve fossils, related to oysters and mussels, filter feeders that rest on the muddy sea bottom filtering out plankton for breakfast, lunch and dinner, yum!

In recent years the limestone on the beach had been of interest to the local economy being mined and burned in the kilns, shown in the photograph above, to produce quick lime that was used as fertiliser for the fields and to make white wash used to paint the outside of local houses.

Makes you think, so much on one local beach that you never notice when you are out n about. Its not just a place to bathe on a hot summers day or fish for flounders and cod. It's a place to roam and study for its ecology, history, geology and palaeontology. The people who come from all over the world to study it would agree that Cocklawburn Beach is a gem with many points of interest and who knows you might find a ten foot prehistoric shark on the shore. 

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