Hornby Island Fossil Field Trip

Hornby is a glorious place to collect. The island is beautiful in its own right and the fossils from here often keep some of their original shell or nacre which makes them quite fetching. At this 72-million-year-old beach site off the west coast of British Columbia, Canada, we find ammonites, gastropods, shark teeth, marine reptiles, birds, fossil crabs, baculites and other bivalve fossils. Many of the fossils found at this locality are found in concretions rolled smooth by time and tide. The concretions you find on the beach are generally round or oval in shape and are made up of hard, compacted sedimentary rock. If you are lucky, when you split them you see a fossil hidden within.