Our groundworkers are used to finding lots of weird and wonderful objects on site, but not many date from 66 million years ago!
It was just a normal day yesterday for Gipping groundworkers, Ian Mumby and Jason Starsmoore, as they were excavating in the garden of our site at Ipswich Museum. That soon changed when they discovered something unusual…
Ian said, ‘While we were excavating the ground for a new water main, we came across something hard in the ground. When I pulled out the digger bucket out, there was the Ammonite. We carefully removed the fossil and reported it to Steve James, Gipping’s Project Manager. It is very rare to find anything of this kind.’
The Ammonite, measuring 14 inches in diameter, has been handed over to Museum staff who are cleaning it, ready for it to join other fossils in the Museum’s extensive collection.
The Museum’s exterior façade includes many intricately carved terracotta panels, depicting various artefacts in its collection, including an Ammonite fossil. While the majority of the panels are in great condition, we are carrying out some consolidation work on those panels directly above the museum entrance, which have deteriorated due to being located on a parapet wall.
Ammonites were shelled cephalopods that died out about 66 million years ago. Fossils of them are found all around the world, sometimes in very large concentrations.
Before we understood what they were, one of the theories was that they were coiled-up snakes that had been turned to stone, earning them the nickname ‘snakestones’. But ammonites weren’t reptiles: they were ocean-dwelling molluscs, specifically cephalopods.
Read more about the project:
https://lnkd.in/eT_Epzhf
