Fossil bonanza at Ladytree Designs

Hannah Good gave us a fascinating workshop at Ladytree Designs earlier this month. We first watched Hannah's demonstration of a volcano erupting - we loved the vinegar and bicarb eruption model - and heard how the magma and dust sediment, mixed with water, trapped the bones of animals in the rock, gradually dissolving them over millions of years, to give us rock fossils of their bone imprints.

We gathered round a large table covered in fossils of all shapes and sizes, many found in a chalk pit behind Hannah's former home in the Cotswolds. Young Nature Watch attendees handled anything that caught their eye and Hannah talked through some key pieces like the large knee joint of a likely Jurassic era bird, comparing it to the smaller sized femur of a swan from our era; a section of fossilised tree trunk where the grains of wood were still soft inside the cracked open rock; and a mammoth's tusk which still smelt of keratin when you cut it.

The children then made casts of fossils with clay to take home with them or leave to be fired in Kate Good's kiln. The table was covered with impressive sea horse, ammonite, sea urchin and other clay imprints. They also dug for a fossil and small crystal each in the sand pit to take home as mementos of their day.