Yorkshire Fossil Finds: Ammonites, Curved (Stone?) Plate, and 'Olympus Mons'

[JamieC7696]

These are some finds of mine made on the Yorkshire coastline... It would be truly spectacular to have very specific identifications for all of them - and even the ones that 'just' turn out to be regular stones and rocks!

 

Regarding most, I think they're quite fragmentary...

 

 

Key:

1-9 = Everything up to the first Ammonite

10-18 = Ammonite material?

19-26 = Alternative shells

27-29 = 'Olympus Mons'/multilayered rocks

30-35 = Other

 

 

Edited May 30, 2022 by JamieC7696

[Tidgy's Dad]

Could you number the different specimens, please?

It'll make it much easier for us to tell you to which specimen we refer in our responses. 

[JamieC7696]

20 minutes ago, Tidgy's Dad said:

Could you number the different specimens, please?

It'll make it much easier for us to tell you to which specimen we refer in our responses. 

I hope the newly included 'key' helps you; just count from the start of each section... Otherwise - I think - I would've had to upload all the photos again, and in that specific order!

[abyssunder]

3-6 are corals

[abyssunder]

10 - it's an ammonite imprint

12 - an ammonite in rock

27-29 - multilayered weathered rock

Edited May 29, 2022 by abyssunder

[Mahnmut]

1 looks like pottery to me.

[JamieC7696]

3 minutes ago, Mahnmut said:

1 looks like pottery to me.

That's very interesting; I never about it like that before... The edges are quite smooth, though, much like a stone, and - at least to me - they don't give the strong impression that it's the broken segment of something man-made (although - from the front and back surfaces - I can totally see how such a conclusion might be reached...). What sort of pottery do you have in mind, and of what sort of age? 

[Ludwigia]

I would agree that it's a piece of some kind of pottery, probably recent. It doesn't take very long for wind and water to erode such things. Might have been part of a flower pot in the past.

[Mahnmut]

As Ludwigia said. hard to tell for sure, as ceramics may remain nearly unaltered for millenia, but may also be rounded by water in few years.

I do find lots of shards on the riverbank (settlement here goes back to roman times).

The only ones I keep are those that clearly show the irregular shapes of pre-industrial, handmade pottery. And there may be roman ones that do not have that look.

If the inner surface of your shard fits a regular cylinder it could also be a piece of sewer pipe.

Nice set of fossils anyway!

[pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon]

2 hours ago, Ludwigia said:

I would agree that it's a piece of some kind of pottery, probably recent. It doesn't take very long for wind and water to erode such things. Might have been part of a flower pot in the past.

 

2 hours ago, Mahnmut said:

As Ludwigia said. hard to tell for sure, as ceramics may remain nearly unaltered for millenia, but may also be rounded by water in few years.

I do find lots of shards on the riverbank (settlement here goes back to roman times).

The only ones I keep are those that clearly show the irregular shapes of pre-industrial, handmade pottery. And there may be roman ones that do not have that look.

 

While it's true that ceramics may, under the best of circumstances, last for millennia - the oldest dating back to about 10000 BCE - the nature of such early ceramics is markedly different from the hard-baked ceramics we have today, being much more porous and thick-walled. This particular bit of ceramics has had glaze applied, which, as a technique in western pottery, has been applied since the Middle Ages. We can therefore at least state that the shard is post-Roman in age.

 

It is, of course, possible that this is a bit of sewage pipe, but with a lot of these pipes these days being constructed from metal, plastic or oxidization fired (i.e. red-coloured) ceramics, often without visible glaze, I'd say it's not likely. Moreover, the gray colour of the paste indicates that a river clay was used and fired at an uneven oxidizing/reducing environment, which also seems to be indicated by the partial fire-clouding seen on the gray/inside face of the sherd. You can moreover see very fine parallel lines on this side of the shard, which are traces of use of a pottery wheel. Now, of course, such wheel-thrown ceramics are still being made today, but it does imply smaller-scale production, thereby less likely to be a piece of pipe. My guess is it's a traditionally made jug or tankard, with emphasis on "traditionally made", as the age range for these things spans centuries, from Medieval to sub-recent and even recent. Hard to narrow it down further.

[JamieC7696]

7 hours ago, pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon said:

 

 

While it's true that ceramics may, under the best of circumstances, last for millennia - the oldest dating back to about 10000 BCE - the nature of such early ceramics is markedly different from the hard-baked ceramics we have today, being much more porous and thick-walled. This particular bit of ceramics has had glaze applied, which, as a technique in western pottery, has been applied since the Middle Ages. We can therefore at least state that the shard is post-Roman in age.

 

It is, of course, possible that this is a bit of sewage pipe, but with a lot of these pipes these days being constructed from metal, plastic or oxidization fired (i.e. red-coloured) ceramics, often without visible glaze, I'd say it's not likely. Moreover, the gray colour of the paste indicates that a river clay was used and fired at an uneven oxidizing/reducing environment, which also seems to be indicated by the partial fire-clouding seen on the gray/inside face of the sherd. You can moreover see very fine parallel lines on this side of the shard, which are traces of use of a pottery wheel. Now, of course, such wheel-thrown ceramics are still being made today, but it does imply smaller-scale production, thereby less likely to be a piece of pipe. My guess is it's a traditionally made jug or tankard, with emphasis on "traditionally made", as the age range for these things spans centuries, from Medieval to sub-recent and even recent. Hard to narrow it down further.

You've read my uninformed thoughts - and transformed them into a cogent, well-informed response: excellent work (again) pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon! 

Edited May 30, 2022 by JamieC7696