A good day in the field logging and sampling at high resolution new site containing a record of #Cretaceous 'Ocean Anoxic Event 2' (can you spot it?) near Ringstead, #Dorset yesterday. Plenty of finds for #FossilFriday including sharks, sea urchins, sponges, belemnites and fish!

Great to be in Hannover at the 12th #Cretaceous Symposium! @jdwitts.bsky.social is presenting an overview of our #Chalk project @nhm-london.bsky.social @ucl.ac.uk

Picture in your mind a shark tooth... We bet this isnt the shape you were thinking of! The shark Ptychodus had a 'pavement' of these strange teeth for crushing hard-shelled prey. Ptychodus fossils have been found all over the world, including from Hessle near Hull. 🏛️ Sedgwick Museum #FossilFriday

Some of today's #chalk views at Eastbourne. 🚁 🐚

#FossilFriday. In 1950, 10-year-old Stephen found a fossil #sponge on the beach at Seaford, East Sussex & donated it @nhm-london.bsky.social. 75 years later, Stephen visited us to see the specimen! Thanks to all the #ChalkHeroes who donated their finds over the years and make our research possible.

Yesterday was #MicrobalanceMonday. Working at the Bloomsbury Environmental Isotope Facility @ucl.ac.uk weighing out #chalk samples for carbon & oxygen isotope analyses. These will tell us about both temperature and carbon cycling in the chalk sea. UCL campus also has some lovely spots for a break!

#MolluscMonday a selection of inoceramid bivalves (and bonus sponges!) from the late Cenomanian Plenus Marls at #Eastbourne. These rocks were deposited during a period of #Cretaceous climate change known as 'Oceanic Anoxic Event 2', but these unusual clams don't seem to mind.

Highlighting a new paper from our team for #FossilFriday! On the discovery and diversity of bone-eating worms in historically collected marine reptile specimens @nhm-london.bsky.social from the UK #chalk.

Looking forward to a fun few days of science and catching up with coclleagues @lifeandplanet.bsky.social @geolsoc.bsky.social. Our @chalksea.bsky.social project has two posters and a talk on #Cretaceous environmental change and effects on marine ecosystems. Come and say hello!

It's the final day of the #FossilFestival at Lyme Regis! Still time to join our team in The Hub to learn about our science reconstructing #Cretaceous ecosystems, handle some chalk fossils from @nhm-london.bsky.social, and draw your own #ChalkSea creatures.

We had a great first day at Lyme Regis #FossilFestival talking to a lot of visitors from local schools, somem fabulous additions to our #chalk ecosystem! If you fancy drawing your own #Cretaceous creature and learning more about our project, we're in The Hub today!

Fun few days #fieldwork touring and logging beautiful Cenomanian - Campanian chalk outcrops in North Lincolnshire and Yorkshire with Prof Andy Gale and Paul Hildreth. Including exposures of the 'Black Band', the northern expression of #Cretaceous Oceanic Anoxic Event 2.

Lovely day in the field at Culver Cliff (Isle of Wight) with @echinerd.bsky.social and PhD student Chia-Hsin Hsu. We looked at the beautifully bedded Cenomanian-Turonian #chalk, finding plenty of echinoderms, bivalves, serpulids and even a nice nautilid!

#FossilFriday Chalk Sea fish, big and small! From the amazing historic chalk collections of Booth Museum of Natural History in #Brighton. Part of ongoing research to understand how these fish were affected by #Cretaceous climate change. 🐟🌡

#MacropomaMonday - MRes student Kaia Spence is at UCL this week, preparing samples of chalk matrix for stable isotope analysis. By comparing oxygen isotope/temperature data with morphometric measurements from fossils, Kaia is examining how body size in coelacanths was affected by climate change.

Welcome to new PhD student Chia-Hsin Hsu from @unisouthampton.bsky.social - Chia-Hsin will be studying morphological evolution of echinoids from the #Cretaceous chalk sea. Including these beautiful Hagenowia from #Yorkshire.

First #fieldwork of 2025 ☑️. Good day at #Eastbourne with @chalksea.bsky.social project collaborator Dr Charlie Underwood, collecting samples and surveying the #Cenomanian Plenus Marls. Plenty to think about, & fossil sponges, bivalves, brachiopods, and echinoderms galore!

🐌 are quite rare in the #chalk as their aragonite shells dissolve easily. An exception is the Family Pleurotomariidae or 'slit snails', sometimes with original shiny nacreous shell on display for #FossilFriday

Sponges are very common in the #Cretaceous Chalk of the 🇬🇧 and their fossilised skeletons were probably important for silica cycling & formation of #flint nodules. This week we've been databasing and selecting 100 specimens for re-dating, helped by our regular volunteer Neil Ireland. #FossilFriday ⚒️🧪

#FossilFriday One of my favourite bryozoans to kick-off 2025, Herpetopora, a runner-like cheilostome here growing across the shell of a Chalk inoceramid bivalve.

You've heard of Piltdown Man, but how about 'the Piltdown Clams'? (As christened by Dr Jon Todd!). A pair of Upper Cretaceous inoceramid bivalves from the #Chalk were 'found' alongside the discredited hominid specimen at Piltdown, East Sussex. Likely stained artificially and planted? 🤔

Great poster by @plesiosarahs.bsky.social @thepalass.bsky.social related to the ChaSE project. New records and a timeline of bone-eating worms living on marine reptile remains in #Cretaceous #chalk seas of the UK.

Thanks to staff at the Sedgwick Museum (Cambridge) for hosting us today! A fun #FossilFriday spent looking through their extensive UK #Chalk collections. Including this rather nice #Cretaceous reconstruction.

Fun day surveying the UK #Chalk collections @britgeosurvey.bsky.social along with project collaborator Dr Charlie Underwood! Couldn't resist also taking a peek at the always amazing core store..

On the face of it, the South Downs doesn't have alot in common with the Alps or Himalaya. However, did you know they formed at the same time? The Alpine orogeny was a geological event in which several continents converged, giving us the great ranges we see today. 📷 Thomas Woolsey 📍 Butser Hill

A highlight of 2024 was the opening of the new gardens at the NHM London. The #Chalk is represented in the 'Evolution Timeline' with blocks of the Ulster White Limestone Formation from Northern Ireland (which make comfy benches!) and some huge 'Paramoudra' flints from #Yorkshire.

We are lucky to have dedicated curatorial support funded on our project at the NHM! Darcy Adhami will be working with us until April 2025. This week, he's been sampling chalk matrix from some large Turonian #ammonites for our colleagues to date using calcareous nannofossil biostratigraphy. ⚒️🧪

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Post a picture you took (no description) to bring some zen to the timeline.

Complete #fossils are actually quite commonly preserved in flint nodules from the #Chalk - check out this amazing echinoid, prepped by a Neanderthal!

#Chalk nautiloid from the Cenomanian Beer Head Limestone of Devon, spotted by our PI Richard on recent fieldwork to Lyme Regis for #FossilFriday.

We will be taking part in the FREE Geologists Association 'Festival of Geology' tomorrow (2nd November) @ the Geological Society, London. Come along and say hello, see some #chalk fossils, learn why they are important, and help us populate our #Cretaceous seascape! #FossilFriday

This #FossilFriday we welcome UCL MSci student Kaia Spence! For her research project at the NHM until May 2025, Kaia will be working on the size:temperature relationship in the enigmatic #Cretaceous 'swordfish' Protosphyraena from the UK Chalk. 🐟

Check out chalksea.co.uk for three blog posts by Chloe Griffiths, Alex Hand, and Hatty Bohun - three Masters students who have recently completed research projects with ChaSE! They describe their research, as well as the most surprising thing they learned about #chalk.. 🧪⚒️🪨

@jdwitts.bsky.social and Prof. Andy Gale from ChaSE were in Maastricht 🇳🇱 this week, presenting a poster at a meeting celebrating 175 years since Andrè Dumont first described the original type section for this stage of the Cretaceous! ⚒️🧪🪨

#TeredoTuesday - these weird looking fossils are the calcified borings of wood-eating 'shipworms', actually bivalve molluscs which once colonised #Cretaceous driftwood. Wood itself is only rarely preserved in the #chalk (see the second pic for a lucky piece of flint!). ⚒️🧪

Great education day at Lyme Regis Fossil Festival! Thanks to all the primary schools that came through to learn about #Chalkfossils, and helped us populate our #Cretaceous marine ecosystem with some really imaginative creatures. ⛏️ 🧪

We're looking forward to being part of the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival this weekend, along with colleagues from NHM London! Come and learn about Chalk Seas and why they were so important, see some #Cretaceous fossils, and help us construct our own Chalk Sea ecosystem.. 🧪 ⛏️

No #MolluscMonday this week due to Bank Holiday - back databasing #Cretaceous Nautilids yesterday! Look how similar this ~95 million-year-old Cymatoceras from the #Chalk (R) is to a modern 'pearly Nautilus' (L). Probably means they also had a similar mode of life as nektobethic scavengers. ⛏️ 🧪

It's been a busy few weeks for the ChaSE project! Continuing to database the NHM London #Cretaceous collections, thinking up outreach activities for the #LymeRegis Fossil Festival, moving unregistered #chalk collections to the NHM, AND planning upcoming fieldwork to #Eastbourne..

Welcome to Imperial College MSc student Hatty Bohun! For her research project at the NHM, Hatty will be working with us to reconstruct the palaeoecology of marine ecosystems from the Cenomanian - Turonian chalk of the southern UK. ⛏️ 🧪

Born #onthisday in 1851 - #ChalkHero Alfred Jukes-Browne. Survey geologist, stratigrapher, and invertebrate palaeontologist. He was responsible for writing several hugely detailed monographs on the #Cretaceous rocks of Britain. The Cenomanian #ammonite Acanthoceras jukesbrowni is named after him. 🧪⛏️

#FossilFriday Sometimes, the most useful museum collections are not always the most photogenic.. 😉 These brachiopods were collected bed-by-bed from the #Chalk of SE England, so have very precise stratigraphic information - perfect for studying #Cretaceous climate change. ⛏️🧪

This #MolluscMonday we're databasing #Chalk #bivalves from @NHM_London historic collections, to examine how ecosystems changed through time and space! This means a lot of transcribing information from sometimes difficult-to-decipher labels... Here's an example of a good one! 🧪⛏️

The answer to our last #FossilFriday post. These are the scales of a stunning specimen of the #Chalk fish Hoplopteryx lewesiensis from the NHM London collections - a #Cretaceous example of a group of modern fish called 'slime-heads'! 🧪⚒️

#Cretaceous close-up for #fossilfriday. Any guesses as to which #Chalk Sea fossil from The Natural History Museum collections we're showing here? 🤔 🧪⛏️

Welcome to Chloe Griffiths, studying an MRes in Biodiversity, Evolution, and Conservation at UCL! For her project at the NHM, Chloe will be looking at body size changes in the chalk fish genus Hoplopteryx and how these may relate to #Cretaceous climate change. 🐟📏🌡 🧪⚒️

Happy Festive #FossilFriday from everyone involved in the ChaSE project! Hope everyone has a Chalky Christmas and a fossil-filled New Year.. 🎅

Another stunning #chalk fish from the NHM London collections sampled for our project. Hoplopteryx lewesiensis is a common #Cretaceous example of a group of modern deep-sea fish known as 'Slimeheads'!

Integrating data from different Chalk collections in museums around the UK is an important part of our project. For this #FossilFriday we were at the fabulous Bristol Museum and Art Gallery! Great macrofossil collections, and a fun 'Chalk Sea' diorama..