CLIFF OF FOSSILS

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22431, 18 June 1938, Page 19

CLIFF OF FOSSILS

(BFECIIIXE -waiTTEir FOB ZEE PBKSS.) [By ERIC LOWE. 3

NOT many people have ever noticed fossils outside of a museum. I have scaled about and prospected for curios in many of the out-of-the-way, little-visited parts of the South Island and until recently I haye never come across any of these queer stony relics of a long-dead era. Neither have you, I suppose. You will, then, probably be surprised to learn that within 30 miles or so of Christchurch there is a place where these things, fossils, concretions, or whatever you like to call them, are lying about by the ton. There are thousands, millions of them. If you have a fancy for these things, I can show you stone oysters and queer sponge or coral-looking concretions, things that lived and loved and breathed and ate in the morning of Time. If you do not believe me you should accompany me to the Cliff of the Fossils, up beyond Amberley beach. That is what I call it. After leaving the car you will have to walk a mile across riverbed and through’long grass on swampy land, and then another alleged mile—it always seems to me more like three—along a sandy beach if the tide is out, or along a most infernal stretch of loose boulders if it is in. After that there is a half-mile scale over or round rocks at the foot of giant cliffs. Perhaps that is why nobody geems to know much about the place, or about the queer stony survivals of bygone ages there. I went there first, a few months ago, with two others making their first visit, under the guidance of Charlie, an enthusiastic sea-angler, who claimed it as a new discovery in fishing grounds. That visit, like . a subsequent one, was made on a fine Sunday in midsummer, when every other seaside place was thronged with visitors. But on neither occasion was there anybody but ourselves at the Cliff of the Fossils. The fishing was a failure and presently old Bill pulled up his line and wandered off round the rocks. After a while I, too, tired of this no-bite business and turned to investigate a peculiarity I had noticed in the rocks above us. To begin with, some of them were of a dull yellowish colour, different from the usual black seaside rocks. Also, they were not rounded and jagged, but big squarish blocks, some of them as big as a room, and with odd, flat sides and tops. Solid Mass of Oysters

All over these flat square surfaces were small protuberances, standing out like the kndb of a door, and looking as if they could be pulled

Coral and Oysters in Canterbury

off with the fingers. For want fIC something better to do I stepped over to examine them. Then 1 got something of a shock-' lam not a scientist; the higher reaches of geology are beyond me, but 1 realised that I was looking at a once living creature that had lived and died at a period so remote as to stagger the imagination, an qM identity compared with which Babylon was only a city of yesterday. They were everywhere, thesa stone oysters and the queer stony sponge-like creatures of a long past era, sticking out of the sandstone rocks like switch fittings on a wall. Some of the great blocks are almost solid masses of oysters; many tons weight. How they came to be among the ordinary black seaside rocks, puzzled me for a,moment until the solution dawned upon me. They have fallen from the huge cliffs above, high as Scarborough, these blocks which were once the bed of the sea, and which, in souse terrific convulsion of Nature, hare been thrust up into the light of day, 600 or 800 feet above the water, whence the masses I saw hare broken away and fallen to the beach below. There they lie. enough to build another Warwick Castle, every slab encrusted with its stony relics of the youth of the world, protruding from the rock which once enclosed them. I take it, because a little matter of an age or so has sufficed to wear away the hard rock from the still harder but once living organisms that it once covered- It would seem that the oysters were alive when they were entombed in that frightful ancient upheaval, for most of them are closed and whole.

There are no live oysters on that coast now, save perhaps an odd tiny rock-oyster, but anyone who has once seen those huge slabs, up 20 feet thick, composed almost wholly of solid stone oysters, will admit that here once existed a bed such as would make the Stewart Island grounds seem like a sparselyinhabited colony. Who can say what strange prehistoric sea creatures may not be enclosed in some of thos® great yellow blocks, though I found only oysters, petrified wood, and two varieties of the queer sponge-like formations. At least I thought they were fossil sponges. Then a scientific friend told me they were fossil corals. But now Air R. A. Falla, Curator of the Canterbury Museum, who was very interested in some specimens I presented to that institution, tells me that they are concretions, of the tertiary period, from sea-beds estimated to have been laid down 30,000,000 years ago.