Many of the rocks you can find out and about in the West Pennine Moors area are actually from different places and where transported here during the ice age glacial periods. Huge rivers of ice formed and moved across the country from radial ‘hubs’ where ice formed and scoured the surface of the land, picking up rocks and later depositing them as the ice melted.
Depending on the types of rock and where they came from they can contain fossils that aren’t native to the area they came to be deposited in. You can also find some relatively exotic minerals and rock types too. Many of the small erratics are in the form of smooth pebbles, pretty hard rocks that have been rolling around in the soil for thousands of years and wearing smooth just like they would at the beach.
Because these rocks have been transported from many locations and dumped together then churned up in the soil, there’s no sediment or sequence of layers to show how the rocks formed, that is to say there’s no ‘context’. An igneous rock from a volcano can be found right next to a limestone rock from under the sea. In order to work out the context you’ve have to identify where the rock came from and look at the geology there.
Who cares if they aren’t ‘local’ fossils? Not me, they’re fossils and they’re cool.
Cythocrinites Fossil Fragments image by munki-boy
