Your ancient Kent relatives

[DirtMechanic]

Chalky soil? (ex-chalk I mean)

Footprints of dinosaurs that walked on Earth 110 million years ago found in the UK

<p>Footprints from a minimum of six different species of dinosaurs, the very last dinosaurs to steer on the united kingdom soil 110 million years ago,...

pathik.co

 

[Tetters]

We have proper chalk here in Kent. What do you mean by ex-chalk??

There were some dinosaur footprints found just down the road - it was in the Kent news yesterday (or the day before) They were found in rocks at Folkestone just a mile or so from the famous white cliffs of Dover....they are proper chalk too

 

[DirtMechanic]

We have proper chalk here in Kent. What do you mean by ex-chalk??

There were some dinosaur footprints found just down the road - it was in the Kent news yesterday (or the day before) They were found in rocks at Folkestone just a mile or so from the famous white cliffs of Dover....they are proper chalk too

Thats the ones! I thought chalk would be soft. Too soft to transmit footprints across the ages. Is it not a harder form of limestone where the prints are now?

 

[zigs]

Thats the ones! I thought chalk would be soft. Too soft to transmit footprints across the ages. Is it not a harder form of limestone where the prints are now?

Looks like the footprints have been found in the sandstone which is next to the chalk. The article is on the national news as I type.

The chalk is a soft limestone, not quite hard enough to build with, but does have some fossils in it. I've found oysters and sea urchins and sometimes pyrites nodules that have replaced organic materials.

The news article showed a 3 toed footprint that they found while filming

 

[DirtMechanic]

The article described prints that were 60x85cm. A creature bigger than my house.

 

[Mike Allen]

Well I must admit. I am often called. 'The old man, the old git etc etc. Sorry I don't go back millions of years.

 

[DirtMechanic]

Looks like the footprints have been found in the sandstone which is next to the chalk. The article is on the national news as I type.

The chalk is a soft limestone, not quite hard enough to build with, but does have some fossils in it. I've found oysters and sea urchins and sometimes pyrites nodules that have replaced organic materials.

The news article showed a 3 toed footprint that they found while filming View attachment 82009

I know you have a penchant for the old ways, so here is a small (really small) gift of some masonry knowledge I became aware of at some point while playing in the mud.

Lime mortar - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[Tetters]

Well he is out in the garden giving it a coat of ''looking at'' at the moment. Did you know that Lime mortar was his speciality?

 

[DirtMechanic]

Well he is out in the garden giving it a coat of ''looking at'' at the moment. Did you know that Lime mortar was his speciality?

No and that is fun! I have seen some of his projects and re-creations of older tools and thought that material was in his frame of historical interest!

 

[DirtMechanic]

I accidentally had a career of working on old buildings, 30 or more churches, an historic royal palace, scheduled ancient monuments, 2 castles and a Roman city in Turkey .

Worked on many smaller houses, cottages and walls etc. too.

Made a vid of some of the work on Dunster Castle in Somerset...

I wrote a bit on Lime mortar a while back too, it's still on my website

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Going back to the Dinatrons and the Chalk, a bit further down the coast there is an outcrop of the top layer of the chalk. This is topped by an inch layer of mud...

The mud is made up of debris that fell back to Earth after the meteor hit. Bits of vapourised rock, soot from the global forest fires and Irridium, from where the meteor pierced the Earth's crust. This mud is found worldwide at the end of the Cretaceous period. Before it there are Dinosaur fossils, after it there aren't

That meteor hit just south of my State, Alabama in the Gulf. I have been morbidly fascinated by the story and its effects.

 

[DirtMechanic]

That is a bit thicker than most people would think.

 

[zigs]

The sand layer isn't the debris layer, that's only about an inch or so thick. I've actually held a piece of it in my hand

 

[DirtMechanic]

How thick is the debris layer and is it mostly carbon or is it mineral or what is its majority composition?

 

[zigs]

The debris layer is less than an inch thick. Mostly clay minerals of terrestrial origin, most of the meteor vaporised on impact. The minerals near the impact have been shocked by it. It also contains irridium which is mostly from Earth too but isn't usually found near the surface so it indicates the crust was breached.

Away from the impact area the layer contains vegetable remains as most of the plants growing at the time died in the heat and the years of darkness that followed.

 

[Marck]

The ninth and penultimate (for today) stop on my virtual garden tour of threads on the Forums is Dunster Castle in Somerset.
A subtropical surprise of Beschorneria yuccoides, Cordyline australis, and Windmill Palms (Trachycarpus fortunei).

 

[Oliver Buckle]

Looks like the footprints have been found in the sandstone which is next to the chalk. The article is on the national news as I type.

The chalk is a soft limestone, not quite hard enough to build with, but does have some fossils in it. I've found oysters and sea urchins and sometimes pyrites nodules that have replaced organic materials.

The news article showed a 3 toed footprint that they found while filming View attachment 82009

The fact that surprised me about chalk was that there are prehistoric mines in the chalk digging for flints. That made me wonder what flint is, the chalk is fossil material. It turns out the flints are fossilized jellyfish of a silica base, There must have been thousands of them.

Ps. I once took down the peg tiles from an old farmhouse to remove a swarm of bees that had got behind it. Putting it back was a hell of a job as the stringers the tiles were hung on had warped out of shape and the tiles were hand made with peg holes at various heights. I had to make up a batch of lime mortar to bed the pegs into and sort out tiles that fitted each stringer, it was like doing a huge vertical jigsaw on a ladder with almost identical pieces. The hardest work of any swarm I ever took.

 

[Marck]

Up the hill from Dunster Castle is an ancient Iron Age fort called Bat's Castle. It is speculated to be a legendary castle, Din Draithou, built by an equally legendary Irish King, Crimthann mac Fidaig. I find old places and things, at the edge of myth and history, to be fascinating.

What really surprised me is that the fort wasn't discovered until 1983, when some local boys found some ancient silver coins. It looks somewhat prominent now by aerial view, but it must have been more hidden back in the 1980s. Perhaps the boys gave it the name Bat's Castle. I don't think there is even a cavity there to house any number of bats.

 

[DirtMechanic]

I found out the chalk that underlies our local black belt is impermeable to water. Thus the politicians have sold it to the world as a very good dumping ground for toxic waste. I wonder if I benefit from all those dumping fees?