And if it is, what is it?

Found this on the banks of the upper Tees yesterday while out walking with my sons. The rock appears to be sedimentary and the ‘fossil’ is around 4″ in length. We often find small fossils up this way but this one is far bigger and as there is no other bone structures visible, I couldn’t make out what it may have been other than maybe vertebrae?

That does look like an interesting find, unusual for the Tees though. Did it look like it belonged there? I’ll have to check at work tomorrow, but it looks like it might be a juvenile erithacus, or part of at least. How big is the rock?

it looks like it might be a juvenile erithacus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erithacus

A baby Robin? are you having a giraffe? 😉

mrs kimbers is a geologist

she reckons trace fossil called a Scalarituba- a burrow

It was on the inside bank on a bend in the river which has many different rocks deposited. The rock is 100x300x75 mm.

Kimbers, that sounds very plausible, cheers.

You might just have found the ancient burial ground of Emily Batty’s ancestors. 😛

What Kimbers said – it’s disturbance of the sediment by a beasty, rather than the beasty itself.

Fossils as sort of mentioned up there aren’t necessarily animals, we have plant fossils on the coast here from some very early period.

Cheers for the replies.

I was hoping that I’d found a new species or something!

Seems very well-defined for a trace fossil. No idea from me though, the fact that it’s perpendicular to the bedding of the rock doesn’t help me guess either.

+1 for a trace fossil. May also be formed from some kind of de-watering process but hard to tell from the pic.

the image is already defined as Scalarituba under a google image search so it must be right 😉