A twist(er) in the tale

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We (the local geology and palaeontology group) were in a huge quarry In Rutland one Saturday. We'd been collecting marine invertebrate fossils in the morning - I'd collected enough fossil shellfish to make a decent gumbo.  There were mussels, horse mussels, clams, sea urchins, all from a warm, tropical sea in the Jurassic, all living in their own trophic niches.  Some of my friends found fish teeth – bony fishes and hybodont (peg-toothed) sharks.

During the morning, the sky had become more threatening, and we had to run to try (and fail) to avoid the downpour that came with a thunderstorm.  Luckily, this quarry has excellent facilities including a warm, dry room with a coffee machine, chairs and tables. It’s not a pretty room but it’s a very welcome one.  Anyway, this was a good time to have lunch, so we did, then we started to move out to another area with rocks and fossils deposited in a freshwater environment.

I was a little behind some of the others, as I’d stopped to chat to one of the group who was still eating his lunch.  As I was walking to join the others, I looked up at the sky behind me and saw this.  Being me, I took a quick snap even though I hadn’t realised what I was looking at – you don’t expect to see something like this funnel cloud.  It was only when I saw the structures in this photo on my laptop screen that evening that I realised what I’d seen!  It was rapidly moving away from us and it was pretty much over the horizon by the time I caught up with everyone, and they were more interested in looking down and at coprolites than the sky.  I was probably the only person in the group to have seen this, and I suspect that minus this evidence, I’d not be believed when I tell the tale!

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