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When Sally and Neville Hollingworth started going mad during the lockdown, rather than baking bread or taking Zoom quizzes, amateur paleontologists turned to Google Earth.
The couple spent the time planning their next trip – using satellite imagery to inspect sites that had previously yielded fossils – when they stumbled upon a quarry in the Cotswolds. From the geology exhibit, Neville, who has a PhD in geology, could tell the site was promising, but he didn’t expect it to report one of the best fossil finds in the Kingdom. -United for decades.
Their 167-million-year-old find has been described by the Natural History Museum as the largest find of Jurassic echinoderms – a group of animals including starfish, brittle stars and brittle stars – ever found in the UK. United.
“As soon as the lockdown was lifted we got clearance and took a look around the quarry,” said Sally, 50, who works in the accounts of a construction company in Swindon.
At first she said the slab they brought back from the quarry “looked a little boring” but after getting it ready in the garage Neville, 60, quickly yelled at her to come and throw a a look.
So far, more than 1,000 specimens of scientific importance have been excavated at the site – the exact location of which is not made public – including an unprecedented collection of rare feathered stars, water lilies and starfish fossils. They also discovered three new species: a type of feathered star, a brittle stars and a sea cucumber. Experts say the find will provide key information that will help explain the evolutionary history of these sea creatures.
“They look pretty boring and then you start to reveal all of these details and the preservation is just amazing,” she said. “I’m looking at this poor little 167 million year old critter. It’s unreal isn’t it. These little guys were there when the dinosaurs were around.
When they realized the significance of what they had found, the couple contacted Dr Tim Ewin, senior curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Natural History Museum, late last year. He said he knew immediately from the photos that “we had something quite special on our hands.” But due to coronavirus restrictions, it took him months before he could investigate further.
Ewin said: “We couldn’t act right away because of the Covid restrictions and things like that, which only got worse. So it was a little frustrating having to hold on tight to loosen the restrictions so that we could go out and investigate the site a bit more.
After a week of extracting specimens from the site – which is no larger than two tennis courts and would have been underwater 167m years ago – he confirmed the find to be of global significance.
He said: “This is the largest collection in terms of the quality of preservation, just the number of individuals and the diversity of individuals.”
The only specimen discovered by the Hollingworths was itself “really exciting”. But, he added, the fact that they can trace the bed across the quarry floor “and get even more specimens in greater numbers is simply unprecedented and incredibly exciting.”
He added: “I feel very honored to have the chance to be alive at the right time this discovery was made.
The Hollingworths have already found a complete Ice Age mammoth skull, but nothing of this gravity. “We say we’re full-time administrators but part-time adventurers,” said Sally, who returned to the site earlier this year to celebrate her 50th birthday with a picnic.
“We always say: let’s go out, travel with hope and not with expectation and have a nice picnic and have a good day and if we find a treasure that’s a bonus. But I think it’s been a crazy trip so far and of course that’s just the start of the trip.
After three days of excavating the site, the team collected 100 clay slabs, which are being prepared for future study and which the museum hopes to present to the public.
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