A 7-year-old boy digs in the garden of his new home and stumbles upon 140-million-year-old Jurassic fossils
A British boy has found Jurassic-era fossils while working in the front garden of his family’s new home in Matlock, Derbyshire.
In the fields of archaeology and paleontology, many significant discoveries are made purely by chance: while doing outdoor tasks that involve digging, people stumble on surprise finds.
This is exactly what happened recently to Elliot, a seven-year-old boy in the U.K.
Jurassic-era fossils found in Midlands garden
After moving with his family to a new home in Derbyshire, a region in England’s East Midlands, Elliot was working in the front garden when he unearthed several red limestone rocks, the BBC has reported.
To Elliot’s astonishment, when he and his father opened up the rocks, they discovered that these seemingly ordinary stones contained ancient fossils of spiral-shaped mollusks.
The Jurassic-era fossils are between 140 million and 180 million years old, according to Dr. Susannah Lydon, a paleontologist at the University of Nottingham.
“How many more dinosaurs can I find?”
“When I look at one of my fossils, it makes me really interested and I think, how many more dinosaurs can I find?” Elliot told the BBC.
Dr. Lydon explained to the media outlet that there are more fossils out there to be found than people may think.
“In the U.K., most of our fossils are hidden under vegetation, which means the rocks they’re in aren’t at the surface or getting revealed by erosion,” she said.
Fossils likely left in Derbyshire by humans
Matlock, the town where Elliot lives, is situated on a rock formation that, according to various geological studies, was once an ancient reef, leading to the discovery of large groups of fossils in the region.
However, in Elliot’s case, Dr. Lydon believes that these rocks were actually brought to the area from Dorset, in south-west England, by other humans.
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