The trilobite (Richard Fortey, 1993) and a fossil bivalve (Hannah W. 2009)

The trilobite had the shape and feel of an artefact; something of the neatness and symmetry of a medallion. Like a medallion it could sit comfortably in the palm of my hand. The fossil showed a head, with its eyes, and a middle lobe, a tail, and a thorax with perhaps a dozen segments – a complicated animal despite its antiquity. I remember a curious feeling, as if in some way this revelation to my hammer after so long a sleep in the bedding of the rock had not just been a matter of serendipity. Perhaps I had been intended to find that trilobite, to make the blow upon just that piece of rock, and to release that very messenger from the past into the world to tell its story. I became aware of the continuity of things. There was a thread running between this trilobite and this investigator. At the time the only feeling I would have been able to articulate was one of specialness of the moment and of the place, a kind of contentment I could hug to myself. The excitement of the find was physical, like any kind of hunting. But the metaphysical component was there, too, at the very least a species of shock to be made aware of how long this place had existed as a haven for life – why else should this stone-bug, preserved in fossil clay in part and counterpart, have seemed as if sent to me as a talisman?

Richard Fortey(1993) The Hidden Landscape: A Journey into the Geological Past, London, Pimlico.

It turns out that what Hannah found in the Brickhills (part of the Woburn Sands formation of greensands, I think) was a fossil bivalve, possibly from the lower cretaceous. The chap at MKNHS identified it as being a fossil that may have been uplifted from older to younger areas of rock. Wow - I've witnessed the finding of a fossil for the first time!