A visitor to our house will very soon notice that there are geological items everywhere. Many are Hubby’s, but quite a few are also mine. As you might guess, I am quite interested in paleontology and fossils, so here are two specimens from my collection.

Ammonites are fascinating and beautiful marine creatures. Their fossils can be found all over the world in various sizes from thumbnail to a few feet. This fossil is from South Africa, and is quite big at about 15cm in size. It’s from the Late Cretaceous period, so it was living at the time of the dinosaurs, shortly before the great extinction event that wiped them, and also the ammonites, out.

An older but no less fascinating prehistoric animal is the trilobite. They were marine creatures that lived in the oceans long before fish, and certainly long before animals colonised land. Today, they look a lot like the Balmain Bug, though they’re distantly related. Their fossils can be found all over the world, in 2D and 3D. I love the 3D fossils, which have been painstakingly extracted using dental drills. Most 3D trilobites come from Morocco, but this specimen comes from St Petersburgh, Russia, and is about 460 million years old, from the Middle Ordovician period.