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Home » Physical Environment/Landscape » Natural history » Fossils

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  • Colliers exhibiting a fragment from a fossilized tree found during coal mining.
Fossilized tree from Britannic Pit, Gilfach Goch
  • Coygan Cave is an important archaeological site. Not only did it provide evidence, in the shape of stone tools, for the presence of late neanderthal people, but it also produced a vast quantity of fossilised animal bones from ice age fauna such as reindeer, woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, and cave bear; all presumably scavenged by hyaenas, the cave's later inhabitants.
Fossilised hyena jaw from Coygan Cave, Laugharne
  • Coygan Cave is an important archaeological site. Not only did it provide evidence, in the shape of stone tools, for the presence of late neanderthal people, but it also produced a vast quantity of fossilised animal bones from ice age fauna such as reindeer, woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, and cave bear; all presumably scavenged by hyaenas, the cave's later inhabitants.
Fossilised mammoth molar from Coygan Cave, Laugharne
  • During the Permian Period (290-250 million years ago) most of the continental plates had merged to form one great super-continent called Pangaea. Wales was very close to the equator and hot, arid, desert conditions prevailed. All of Wales was above sea level, no sedimentary rocks were deposited, and therefore no Permian fossils occur in Wales. At the end of the Permian there occurred a massive extinction event, with over 85% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial life becoming extinct. It is likely that this was caused by a combination of factors, including volcanism, glaciation, change of sea-levels, and a possible meteor or comet impact. During the Permian Period, southern low latitudes were covered by dense forests of woody seed-plants, mainly trees, known as glossopterids. Different types of glossopterid tree produced different types of leaves, but the most commonly found were elongate with a strong midvein and meshed lateral veins, known as Glossopteris. Such leaves can be found in Permian rocks in South America, southern Africa, India, Australia and Antarctica, and was one of the main pieces of evidence to support the early claims for continental drift by the German scientist Alfred Wegener. During the Permian Period these areas were part of a single land mass known as Pangaea, which lasted for around 50 million years before breaking up.
Permian Period - Fossil: Composite of several Glossopteris, evidence of continental drift
  • In 1947 this reddish rock was found to contain small bones of some of the world's earliest true mammals. It consists of material preserved in fissures in the Carboniferous Limestone, and is particularly important as these fragile bones are very rarely preserved elsewhere. At the end of the Triassic, the rocks forming the surface of most of South Wales were the much the same as those exposed today. The Vale of Glamorgan was being increasingly covered by a shallow sea, with the Carboniferous limestone hills forming several small islands. The remains of the plants and animals which lived here were washed into caves and fissures in the limestone. The islands were finally drowned in the early Jurassic and the whole area was covered with more recent sedimentary rocks, most of which have now been eroded away. The Triassic fissures are only exposed in certain quarries today, but occasionally they are found to contain fossilised bones and teeth of small dinosaurs, various reptiles and early mammals, along with fossil plant remains. Morganucodon and Kuehneotherium, two of the world's earliest mammals, were tiny, shrew-like animals, probably no more than 3 centimetres long. They lived at the same time as the earliest dinosaurs. They were probably insect eaters, and may have been nocturnal.
Fossil: Bones of Morganucodon, the earliest true mammal [image 1 of 2]
Fossil: Edmontosaurus annectens - a plant-eating dinosaur [image 2 of 3]