Bladder wrack (fucus vesiculosus)

in close up. On sandstone rocks on the upper beach to the west of the Bay.

Parish notices: redesign due.

We will shortly be off into the bowels of ANHORB to do a redesign. In the meanwhile this was the bay yesterday. Yes, that's early November at 54 deg north.

What's inside a barnacle?

The things with folded legs you can see at the bottom right of this laminaria holdfast are what's hidden inside the barnacle shells that you usually only see closed on rocks when the tide is out. This laminaria must have been torn off its rock in the recent stormy weather. Below, holdfast detail:

Perfect belemnite...

spotted on the one day I didn't take the rock hammer to the beach. If there is a palaeontological curse*, I would like to utter it now.

*I'd also like to know what it is. Is there some kind of arcane oath that paleontologists yell when they hit thier thumb with a rock hammer or shatter a T-rex skull into fragments?

Fossil wood.

On the west side of Runswick Bay the sandstone seam that tops the cliff has been extensively undercut and a lot of sandstone boulders have tumbled to the foreshore. There are some superb fossils to be found, but most (like this piece of fossilized wood) are in large chunks of stone and are irrecoverable.

Runswick Bay plesiosaurs...

have a big brother (or sister) from Dorset.

The Natural History Museum's pliosaur is from the Kettleness alum quarries at the eastern end of Runswick Bay. On the Today Programme this morning a palaeontologist said that little is known about plesiosaurs because so few complete specimens have been found.

Those of us lucky enough to live here clearly have a duty to be on the beach and cliffs looking at the weathering and rock falls. Dorset's pliosaur is reckoned to be 16 metres long and said to be one of the greatest top predators ever that 'would make T rex look like a kitten'.

Recent finds...

I think we've found a chunk of a plesiosaur/icthyosaur spine: the Natural History Museum are examining photos. A few nice ammonites and a rare example of a small crinoid stem. Photos to come. It's lashing down and blowing a gale this weekend so there should be some good cliff falls and maybe some better fossils.

Remember the Runswick Bay ratfish?

Which washed up here last year? Well the ugly but endearing chap has made it into Marine Wildlife News. A little bit of fame for our small but beautiful bay and to anyone interested in what lives and washes up on our beaches, Mr Horton's site should be bookmarked.

PS if you find one of these things do not do as I did and walk home swinging it by its tail. The dorsal spine is venomous.

Gryphea (Devil's toenail) fossil.

Now here's a find (by my better half). There are millions of them 15 miles up the coast at Redcar but they are relatively infrequent finds at Runswick. This one has been tumbled around in beach pebbles for a while. It's a bivalve, a jurassic oyster relative and you usually find the curved lower shell which gives the fossil its nickname, but this one has some intriguing structures fossilisised on the gap where the flat upper shell would be: look for the scallioped structures which plug the usually hollow open end of the lower shell. If any Gryphaeaologists can comment, I'd be grateful. There is too much of the scalloped edge visible for it simply to be the upper valve of the Gryphaea.

Here's the thing sideways on:

Gryphaea arcuata (Lamarck 1801) found lower Jurassic. They were believed to relieve rheumatism in humans and sore backs in horses.

Shore crab (Carcinus maenas)

In the home rockpool...

and in the hand.

The first northerlies of September

are making the sea rough and whipping up some waves even in sheltered Runswick Bay. It has been very still and calm in the last month with little washed up. We'll be on the beach tomorrow to see what the rougher weather has brought.

Fish species in Runswick Bay.

Sunday saw the annual Runswick Bay fishing contest. 16 boats took part and went after mid-water and bottom-feeding species with a variety of baits, feathers and pirks.

The species brought up for the weigh in were cod (Gadus morhua), whiting (Merlangius merlangus), mackerel (Scomber scombrus), pollock (Pollachius pollachius), a solitary gurnard (Eutrigla gurnadus) and a rather lovely ballan wrasse (Labrus bergylta), which despite having my camera I somehow managed not to photograph.

Shore anglers say that they regularly catch sea bass from the beach. There are also greater weever fish in the bay: a kayak angler was stung by one, became too disorientated to paddle and needed rescuing by the Rnswick Bay Rescue Boat.

Runswick fossil icthyosaur skull.

This one - a juvenile from the size - is in Whitby Museum, which has a superb collection of local Jurassic fossils, many from Runswick Bay. This shows how hard it is for the untrained eye to pick out a fossil beyond the obvious ammonites and belemnites. We're getting back to the living stuff this week.

Ammonite in nodule.

The ammonite was showing through the edge of a hard nodule. I drilled the nodule around its edges using a masonry bit and cracked it open with a chisel. Much of the shell has been replaced by crystals.


Close up: note the clean shell spiral at the centre.

ELWS: the lowest low water I have ever seen.

I can't ever remember seeing this much beach exposed at low tide. ELWS means 'extreme low water springs', the datum at which low tide is fixed on maritime charts.

Boulder clay cliffs 11 months apart.

May 2009

June 2008

What is this?

It was not a hot day this pic was taken in January), there was no runoff suggesting the rockpool was contaminated and I wondered if it was some early gamete shedding. It wasn't crystallized out salt either.

Nodule north of Runswick Bay.

The shale is full of these inclusions. They're much harder than the surrounding rock. Crack some and you get lovely whole 3d ammonites (most around here and flattened and beyond recovery) , crack others and you get a crystralline interior that smells of oil. Try and crack others and you blunt your rock hammer and get a jarred arm.

More littoral blogging...

The Coastal Zone, all about the lovely Isle of Wight (about where I have fossil envy). Go see Ron's blog now.

Meanwhile here we are expecting force 8-9 onshore winds and a 5.6 metre tide, so I shall pop down and have a look.

Two belemnites, a piece of fossilized wood

And a limpet (Patella sp.) which, if has any thoughts can only be meditating on mortality when faced with such a nearby fossilscape.

Now clear off

and visit Earthstudent.

About 3 feet long, all on the same plane in jurassic shale

...not excatavatable and I know I'm not the first person to see it, but (paleontologists please) do we have a part of a skeleton here?

Zonation illustrated on a sea wall at low spring tide.

Squiggles in Jurassic shale (2)

Ha! Another Jurassic beach and what have we here?More squiggles in the shale, similar to these.

Ragworm...

Nereis, methinks or maybe Hediste diversicolor. Caught in a small rockpool on a sunny day.Just look at the difference in the colours of the animal out of the water and the green of the immersed half. One of these little buggers bit me when I was a kid fishing and they can deliver quite a nip. I was trying to shove a hook through, so fair do's. And if this picture is anything to go by, ragworm spring was in the air... Yep, estuary ragworm boys crawl around releasing sperm at spring tides (it was a spring tide today) which the females them collect. That done, this chap will die.

Squiggles in Jurassic shale: help needed.

Is there a living creature that digs channels in Jurassic shale beaches on the North Yorkshire coast to cruelly mislead me, or could these be Jurassic critter tracks?

Blogkeeping.

Fellow Yorkshire nature blogger Sheffield Wildlife has started a multi-user blog for birders called Yorkshire Birders. It is just out of the egg. Go visit and contribute.

Sociable limpets.

You can't help but get the impression that they like company when hunkered down at low tide. Compare and contrast to Limpet City, where the creatures seem to be more uniformly distributed over the surface in a bid for limpetsraum. Look at how bare the rock is.Either the limpets do an excellent job of eating every alga that tries to grow, the rock is not a suitable substrate for seaweed holdfasts to penetrate or it's just too bashed about by the North Sea for the wrack that grows everywhere else to settle. Maybe all three. It'd be interesting to erect a limpet-proof fence around a section of this rock flat to see what happens in the enclosure.

Pyritical ammonite.

Hilderocas sp., flattened, eroded and part-gilded in iron pyrites.

Lugworms.

A low spring tide, so the fishermen were out in force digging for...Lugworms, Arenicola marina. These polychaetes live in a u shaped burrow in the sand and filter food particles out of the sediment. They can make up a third of the biomass of a sandy beach.
Humans having dug holes and left piles of sand around, some oystercatchers came and had a scavenge.