Buried treasure

Buried in my garage for some years and prior to that, inside a block of flint in the chalk at the nature reserve I look after for around 80 million years!

I went to an inspiring talk last night on the history of the Chilterns by my old friend John Tyler, a wonderfully knowledgable naturalist. He showed a fantastic collection of fossils found in chalk spoil resulting from excavations, including by badgers. This prompted me to dig out a box where I've stored various artifacts collected over the years at the reserve. Most of the fossil type objects were not up to John's in quality, but this one definitely is.

It is a lump of flint, split open to reveal a fossilised echinoid or Sea-urchin. I'm fairly sure this is a species of Holaster. Finding this again has rekindled my interest in chalk fossils and as we have recently excavated some chalk scrapes to improve the habitat for butterflies I can feel a new sort of winter activity coming on.