Rock bang full of oysters

-


You've just got to love Portland Stone, with its distinct facies.  This is grove whitbed, a Jurassic limestone famous for being absolutely full of oysters.  I took this one, I think, at Green Park tube station in London. The station entrance, on Piccadilly, is literally a work of art; called Sea Strata, it was created by John Maine RA with the building clad in different facies of Portland Stone. This is the highly fossiliferous Grove Whitbed, which is full of oyster shells.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rock-hard 'toffee'

-
Image
Portoro marble - looking more like a dessert than a rock The day I took this photo was a feast for the eyes and the soul; whilst a rehearsal for the following week's Trooping of the Colour was underway nearby, my Other Half and I were visiting the [then] Queen's Gallery  at Buckingham Palace, London. It was the first time we saw any of the Royal Collection. We saw a Fabergé egg for the first time, and it was as beautiful and as finely wrought as we had imagined it would be.  We saw the golden Exeter Salt, we saw sculptures carved from the finest marble, we saw paintings by Old Masters and we saw, for the very first time for either of us, sketches by Leonardo da Vinci with notes in his mirror writing! One thing I also drank in, though, was this polished slice of Portoro marble. Stonemasons often refer to any stone that will take a polish as a marble, but Portoro is a true marble, i.e. a limestone that has been altered (metamorphosed) by heat and pressure; it comes from La Spezia
Read more

The sorry-looking Coelacanth

-
Image
I grew up reading about the coelacanth and about how it had been rediscovered in 1938 when it was thought to have become extinct millions of years ago.  When I first saw this specimen, in London's Natural History Museum a mere decade ago, my first reaction was an almost child-like wonder.  Here in the actual flesh was this living fossil (well, this example wasn't living, obviously...).  It was a solid, primitive, hefty-looking fish and looking at it felt like looking at a living dinosaur.  Yes, I know...  It is fair to say that as a species it isn't an underwhelming fossil fish this month (if you know, you know) or any other month. My second reaction was that it actually looks rather sorry for itself and this particular one is in fact underwhelming.  Like everything else that has been 'pickled' the way this one has, it has become pale and colourless over time. It really is a shame - and not just because live ones are the most amazing blue that would suit what se
Read more

The snakeskin wall

-
Image
  "Why did you choose geology?" asked the tutor of each of us in turn. "Well, I suppose it was 'Once a rock chick, always a rock chick" I replied.   I actually had that as my tagline in my course's message board signature at the time, and one of the other students commented that she had seen me and the said tagline on there. It was true for more than one given value of the word 'rock'. I had listened to a fair bit of it during my teens and early twenties; Deep Purple's 'Black Night' still puts a smile on my face (Incidentally, I know that it's a rather heretic view, but I actually prefer Steve Morse to Richie Blackmore).  I can take or leave quite a lot of rock nowadays – but I get really excited by a good orchestra(!) I had become fascinated by geology and palaeontology in the very early parts of my degree (and I still am). I'd planned to study biology and ecology, but my foundation course was multi-disciplinary and I contracte
Read more