Hello! I am Toby, and I am a fossil hunter. We went to Whitby, and we had to get there quickly, because it was getting dark. It was also very cold. I've got my fossil hammer and my protection glasses in this picture, and my woolly hat and my scarf. Can you see the heart in the stone below?

It got dark very quickly, so we went to a cafe, and I had a hot chocolate. Then we got in the car, and we drove to the youth hostel at Boggle Hole. We had to park the car and walk to the hostel in the dark, but I had a torch.

The next morning, Mummy and I went fossil hunting in the dark!! We used the torch to see the stones, and we took just one step onto the beach, and we found a star-shaped crinoid stem! But it was tricky in the dark, so we went back to have some breakfast.

This is what we could see from our window of our room.

After breakfast, we went back to the beach with Daddy. I found an ammonite. We'll show you pictures of everything we found another time.

You had to cross this bridge to get to the hostel. Any car had to drive into the sea and then to the hostel!! We want to come back in the summer!

Here are some more fossils we found. I found the most, because there are lots in this one! It was really big and heavy, but we carried it all the way back up to the car.

There are nearly no rocks on these ammonites, so they are our bestest. There are two positives and two negatives, that means, two are ammonites and two are the patterns made by ammonites, can you tell which is which (they don't belong together)? Mummy found the ammonite in the picture below - it was just lying on the beach.

Last week-end, we went to Staithes and Port Mulgrave to go fossil hunting. It was Mummy's birthday. At Port Mulgrave, there was a path down to the beach - it was a loooong way down!

We found lots of ammonites, and some other fossils, but we'll tell you about the ammonites first. All the surprise fossils, they were all just ammonite surprise bits. A surprise fossil is when you don't know if it has got a fossil on the inside, then you crack it open. Sometimes, you can see a tiny bit of fossil on the outside, and that gives you a hint. We'll show you the other fossils another day, but here are the surprise fossils!

Today, we sorted out all my fossils, and put the bestest ones on a shelf. We had one that we'd found in Whitby, and it wasn't very pretty, so Mummy decided to bash it with a hammer and see if she could make the ammonite come out. And look what's inside. The ammonite is made out of pyrite, and there are crystals, too. Now it is on my bestest shelf! (Edit from Mummy: We need to learn how to prep fossils!)

Today I was helping Mummy with a job. We went to Shugborough and visited Dinah, who works there. She helped us take pictures of our pigeons. On the way back, we went to a fossil place. It was a quarry (edit by Mum: West Quarry), and we've been there before. When we got there, we had a snack, and then we walked down. We found two types of fossils, and lots of each. One were brachiopods, they are in this picture. We also found lots of crinoid stems.

We found these snail shells at the quarry. One of them is really pink - can you see?

This week-end, we went to Hornsea. We stayed in a hotel and they had a big, big wheel from a ship, for steering it. 

We went fossil hunting, and this time, we had all the tools, because Daddy had some for his birthday. We had a trowel for digging in the lumps that had fallen from the cliffs (they are made from clay, and stones are really hard to get out, even if they are already sticking out). We had a hammer for hammering rocks to see if there are any fossils inside, and bags to put our fossils in.

We found lots of these. They are called gryphaea, and we had to check how to say that, but people also call them "Devil's Toenails", that was from when they didn't know that they were fossils. In the picture, there are two types - the ones that were in the cliffs were all rough, and the ones that were on the beach were all smooth.

We didn't find many ammonites, but we found a few, and here are some pictures:

We also found some fossils in the big rocks that were put up as a sea defence wall, but they were too big to take them away with us.  You can see a gastropod in this picture. How would you pronounce gastropod?

We found lots and lots and lots of colonial corals. I like saying that word! We found so many, and a humongous one - in the end, we left some behind for other people to find!

When we got home, we were cleaning all the fossils and sorting them out. We have a few what we don't know if they're fossils, can you help us? We will put them on the "Are These Fossils?" page. 

On the way home we bought what we need to make the dinosaur footprint, and soon we can show you it and tell you about the dinosaur footprints we saw when we visited Martin Whyte. When we were in Hornsea, we kept looking for a T-Rex skeleton, but we didn't find one!

In August 2012, we went to Whitby on holiday. It was a special trip, because we looked for fossils. We stayed in the youth hostel, it was right next to Whitby Abbey, and we went fossil hunting lots of times - every day! Actually, it was several times each day. When you hunt fossils on the beach, you have to be careful in case the tide comes in!! We always checked if the tide came in. We found lots and lots and lots and lots of fossils (and lots and lots and lots). We want to go back to Whitby another day.

My first fossil hunt was to a quarry near Matlock in Derbyshire - that's not far from where we live. Mummy and I went. We didn't have a fossil hammer, so we used other stones to crack the stones open. You can't find all fossils everywhere, because you find the fossils of the creatures that used to live there, millions and millions of years ago. And if the creatures didn't live there, then there won't be fossils of that creature. Near where we live, you can find shells (they are called brachiopods in fossil-speak), and we found some!!