Actually, it began in 1989 when we first visited the Yorkshire coast in the UK to collect fossils. We´ve been back every year at least once since. The collection has grown, mostly ammonites but also crinoids, starfish, bivalves, brachiopods and even some marine reptile bone material.  As of today, it contains roughly 2500 specimen ranging from the lowest to the highest Lias (a time in the Earth´s Jurassic period about 200-175 million years old).

But this blog is mostly about the ammonites and the idea to build a documentation about finding, preparing and identifying them with the clear goal to publish this in book form at some point…
This idea started some years ago amongst members of the UKFOSSILS forum (discussfossils.com), kindly provided by the UKGE Geologists Equipment store (http://www.ukge.co.uk/).
An early expression of this idea can be seen in the members identification database, which was meant to provide a mechanism to “crowd source” pictures and identifications from various collections. While this worked fine in the beginning, the “crowd sourcing” aspect slowly got lost, with various members leaving the forum for different reasons and my identifications for liassic ammonites being the only ones left…

For personal reasons I had to abandon execution of this project for a while, mostly due to lack of time, but now the time seems right to restart it, this time with myself in complete control of all aspects of the project.

This blog will provide a diary of this project,  from finding ammonites, preparing them, identifying them and the process of documentation & writing the book…

AndyS