A 9-year-old child strolling on a beach in Llantwit Major, Wales (UK) on Sunday made a discovery he’s not likely to soon forget. Eli was with his parents when his gaze was caught by a spotted shape on a rock. It looked like a seashell but had a surprising appearance. For good reason, it was in fact a mollusc fossil of about thirty centimeters, says the BBC.
A remnant of the Jurassic era
Accustomed to fossils, of which he has a collection at home, Eli quickly understood what type of formation he was dealing with. However, he had never seen a mollusk fossil, called an ammonite, of such a large size. Its discovery proved all the more interesting as the object is in fact some 200 million years old and dates from the Jurassic era.
Nick Felstead, specialist in physical geography, found the presence of the fossilized ammonite on the Welsh beach surprising. The expert also insisted on the rare nature of the remains of the mollusk close to the octopus, squid and cuttlefish. The fossil “shows the internal compartments that the ammonite used to float and which were filled with quartz during fossilization, which is even less frequent,” commented the academic.