Fossils of Folkestone, Kent

Folkestone is surely one of the top ten places to look for fossils in Britain. The variety of fossils that can be found there is truly staggering. For centuries geologists have visited Folkestone, mainly attracted by the beautiful Gault Clay ammonites that are so abundantly found along the beach. Aside from ammonites and other invertebrate fossils, a rich variety of vertebrates has been found, including rare dinosaur remains. There is no doubt an untapped potential for new and exciting discoveries at Folkestone.

This book aims to showcase the spectacular fossils that can be found at Folkestone in a series of 100 full colour plates (see below), illustrating approximately 200 different species from the Chalk, Gault Clay, Lower Greensand and also the Pleistocene mammal fauna. It is designed as a user-friendly identification guide for anyone collecting fossils there and hopefully will encourage more people to collect there and report any new rare finds.

This guide has an advantage over others – this and others all have marvellous full colour illustrations of the relevant Gault fossils, but as anyone who has struggled over the boulders from the end of the concrete harbour to Copt Point will know, there is a lot of Greensand, containing marvellous and multitudinous trace fossils … and around the corner in East Wear Bay there is the beginning of the Chalk that ends up at the White Cliffs of Dover. The book includes lovely illustrations of the usual (and some of the less usual) suspects from the Gault (ammonites, crabs, belemnites, vertebrates and so on), but Philip Hadland also illustrates and discusses many of the fossils from the Lower Greensand, Chalk and Pleistocene sediments. The guide also covers the history of collecting at Folkestone, along with the geology, habitat reconstruction, etc. Importantly, it also contains brief information on preserving, cataloguing and storing fossils and a bibliography of references and further reading.