Pete Ronson

Essex is renowned for its rich clay base in its soils, the lowest layer which was transferred all over the county in heavy swaths by a subtropical sea roughly 50 million years back. This ‘London Clay’ (as it’s better known as) has produced innumerable fossil finds through the years that demonstrate the diversity of creatures which lived on our soils prior to us. The excavations of the cement industry in Harwich, all through the 18th and 19th Centuries, found a number of notable fossils that chart the earliest incarnations of mammalian existence. To this day, Walton-on-the-Naze is known to be one of most internationally recommended locations for fossil hunting acclaimed locations for fossil excavations| internationally; where the London Clay deposits store some of the finest preserved bird fossils of the Tertiary age ever uncovered.