MUDLARK by LARA MAIKLEM - SIREN's LINK TO SEA BOOK REVIEW - SEA FOSSILS

What a fascinating book.  For those of you who like to go to the water's edge and see what you can find - besides sea shells and sea weeds washed ashore - this book may inspire you to think ahead about where you can go and why.  Lara Maiklem's hobby as a mudlark, a person who finds things washed up by river tides, has made her an expert about the way the Thames River, the river that goes through the city of London to the ocean, flows.  Most surprising to me was that this is a river that has tides.  With the ebb and flow of the tides, various objects have been deposited, others have no doubt been washed out to sea for hundreds of years. So she and other mudlarkers make it a point of frequently visiting various areas where the river flows to see what has been brought up, what is embedded, and her finds include ancient coins, painted tiles, and a variety of objects like needles, pins, thimbles, and beads, religious objects and weapons.  As most of these objects were made of natural materials - not plastic - they don't threaten the living creatures of those waters so much though of course there is a history of sea creatures becoming extinct over time. It's those creatures though that I want to excerpt about. 

Page 53  Excerpt:  Encased in clay and lying among the gravel on the foreshore are the fossilized remains of the creatures that inhabited those prehistoric seas.  The pencil-like internal shells of belemnites, ancient extinct squid, that swam in shoals over 66 million years ago; bivalves the size and shape of cockles, frozen in stone; and 'devil's toenails', an extinct form of marine oyster that lived in the sediment of the seabed.  At Warden's Point on the Estuary, fossilized crabs, lobsters, shells, twigs, and shark teeth fall from the low cliffs of London clay onto the beach where they can be collected by the handful, and occasionally smoothed pieces of yellow amber will wash ashore where the Estuary and the North Sea mingle. Years ago, before people knew what fossils were, they were shrouded in folklore and assigned all kinds of quasi-religious and mystical associations. One of the most commonly found fossils in the south of England, and along the Thames' foreshore, are echinoids.  The colloquial name for echinoid is 'sea urchin', which comes from the old country name for hedgehog....