The layout of Kendal town is characterised by the narrow yards and lanes branching from the main street. There were once about 150 ‘yards’ in Kendal, often named after the owner of the main house which usually stood at the top of the yard.
A good example is Yard 83 – Dr Mannings’s Yard, on the right hand side as you walk up Highgate. The yards on this side of Highgate used to run in parallel lines down to the river, where there were factories, weaving shops, dying works, and even a windmill (Yard 65 is called Windmill Yard).
On Highgate at the posted coordinates you will find Yard 57, here you will find a well preserved fossil hidden behind the red square in the photo below.
Logging Requirements (Questions to Answer)
In order to log a find against this EarthCache, you will need to visit GZ and make some observations and then answer some questions and send answers to me via my Geocaching profile or through the Messenger Centre.
1) Please describe the fossil obscured by the red square in the image above.
2) Please identify which kind of fossil this is.
3) Can you see evidence of any other Fossils on the pillar.
4) Compulsory task: Include in your log a photograph of you, your GPS or another identifiable item near GZ, taking care not to include anything in the photo that may give away your answers.
What is a fossil?
Fossils are the preserved remains of plants and animals whose bodies were buried in sediments, such as sand and mud, under ancient seas, lakes and rivers. Fossils also include any preserved trace of life that is typically more than 10 000 years old.
Soft body parts decay soon after death, but the hard parts, such as bones, shells and teeth can be replaced by minerals that harden into rock. In very exceptional cases, soft parts like feathers, plant ferns or other evidence of life, such as footprints or dung, may also be preserved.
Fossils give us a useful insight into the history of life on Earth. They can teach us where life and humans came from, show us how the Earth and our environment have changed through geological time, and how continents, now widely separated, were once connected.
Fossils provide important evidence for evolution and the adaptation of plants and animals to their environments. Fossil evidence provides a record of how creatures evolved and how this process can be represented by a ‘tree of life’, showing that all species are related to each other.
Fossils can also be used to date rocks. Through the process of evolution, different kinds of fossils occur in rocks of different ages, enabling geologists to use fossils to understand geological history. For geologists, fossils are one of the most important tools for age correlation. Ammonites for example, make excellent guide fossils for stratigraphy; they can be used to determine the relative age of two or more layers of rock, or strata, that are in different places within the same country or somewhere else in the world.
Ammonite. Ammonites were marine animals belonging to the phylum Mollusca and the class Cephalopoda. They had a coiled external shell similar to that of the modern nautilus. In other living cephalopods, e.g. octopus, squid and cuttlefish, the shells are small and internal, or absent.
Belemnites. Belemnites were marine animals belonging to the phylum Mollusca and the class Cephalopoda. Their closest living relatives are squid and cuttlefish.They h ad a squid-like body but, unlike modern squid, they had a hard internal skeleton.
Bivalves. Bivalves, which belong to the phylum Mollusca and the class Bivalvia, have two hard, usually bowl-shaped, shells (called valves) enclosing the soft body. The valves are the parts usually found as fossils, but decay of the elastic hinge tissue that joins them means that they are rarely preserved together.
Brachiopods. Brachiopods are marine animals belonging to their own phylum of the animal kingdom, Brachiopoda. Although relatively rare, modern brachiopods occupy a variety of seabed habitats ranging from the tropics to the cold waters of the Arctic and, especially, the Antarctic.
Corals. Corals comprise a soft-bodied animal called a polyp that lives in a calcareous skeleton or corallum. Food is taken in and waste products are discharged through the mouth, which is surrounded by tentacles with poisonous stings.
Crinoids. Crinoids are marine animals belonging to the phylum Echinodermata and the class Crinoidea. An array of branching arms (brachia) is arranged around the top of a globe-shaped, cup-like structure (calyx) containing the main body of the animal. In many fossil forms, the calyx was attached to a flexible stem that was anchored to the sea bed.