Ichthyosaur Vertebrae Fossil Ely
Ichthyosaur vertebrae fossil from Ely
I’ve been meaning to show you all this find for a while now. It is heavy and solid and has a depression either side and was one of my first really cool finds before I became an archaeologist, I found it about 1994/5. Now really this is in the realms of palaeontology rather than archaeology but at the time, when I found it I had no clue what it was, and seeing it laying in the mud on the field surface, I at first thought it was an ashtray or something! Anyway, I picked it up and took it home. At the time I was living in Ely and this is where I found this fascinating object. I was quite accustomed to walking along footpath by the edges of fields and looking for little bit of treasure in the form of broken pieces of blue and white china, which is something we’d done since children. But on this occasion, I was presented with this strange heavy stone like thing.
I took it to the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge, as they would look at items people brought in for identification. I met the lovely man who worked there at the time and who happened to look quite like Richard Attenborough from the Jurassic Park films. He told me that what I’d found was an Ichthyosaurus spine disk (or vertebrae), he said it was very old and fossilised. An Ichthyosaur is something like a prehistoric dolphin with teeth. I wish I could remember how old he said it was! Either way there is plenty about such things nowadays on the internet, incase you are further interested to find out more. You can check out the wikipedia page about them HERE.
An idea of what the Ichthyosaur looked like
The thing that puzzled me was the location in which I found it. It was in the field to the west, just besides Dunstan Street, Ely, Cambs. Which is still on quite high island ground and not down low in the fens. There have since been houses built on the field, so I wonder if any further remains of such a date were found - what happened to the rest of that ichthyosaur?…..
Approximate location of Ichthyosaur find Ely, Cambs
