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Somerset crocodiles

18 July 2015
Geology

At http://phys.org/print356339924.html … tells a story of the discovery of fossils in Ilminster in Somerset back in the 19th century. They have been in a museum store room for close to 150 years but it seems somebody recently spotted them and had a close look. They are fossils of a marine eco-system going back to the era of the dinosaurs.

The article was published in the Journal of the Geological Society, July 15th (2015). The fossils are three dimensional which is what has attracted the new reseach. Most fossils in rocks tend to be flat. They were preserved in roundish nodules and some 100 of them ended up in the museum. They contain fish, small marine crocodiles, ichthyosaurus, as well as squid (with ink sac and other soft tissue preserved) and hundreds of insects. The site where they were found, an embankment, has since been built on.

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