We are in the southern area of England and we're about to go fossil hunting and they're gonna make a little video for you guys.

It's not gonna be the best because the weather is but it's actually the perfect weather for fossil hunting because strong waves and the wind and the rain and everything helps wear away the cliffs where the fossils are, bring them down to the beach where we can find them.

So yesterday we went out on a little tour with the local museum guide.

He showed us how to collect fossils where you can find them, taught us all about them and now we're going to go out and do it by ourselves today.

So this area of the Jurassic coast is actually quite unique because there are so many fossils here.

They actually encourage you to take them take them home.

You can actually sell them and encourage people to set up shops and sell fossils because if people don't cut them off the beach they will just be worn away by the ocean.

So we're going to go out there and see what we can find.

Not make any money.

The ones that we found yesterday on our tour were quite small.

And if you go into the local fossil shops here, they only sell for about 5 to £10 each.

So we're not rich yet.

But maybe today we'll see what we can find chris actually found.

A huge one.

Yesterday.

It was just a little piece.

Unfortunately not a full one but it was really big.

So the rain has stopped for the most part, it's quite windy though.

Hope the tide is out enough.

You have to check the tide times before going fossil hunting to make sure that there will be space on the beach and I think it should be just about right.

There was actually a landslide recently that brought down some of the cliff and that's like perfect conditions because there's fresh fossils that people haven't picked up yet.

The museum's told me this little fossil toolkit when we went on our walk yesterday comes with the ham some safety glasses.

If you are going to be hammering the rocks to open them up and look for fossils.

But yesterday I found that I was mostly using the hammer for kind of just like scraping the surface of the sand to look for fossils.

So today we went to Tesco and we got some ice scrapers.

So that chris could have one as well.

So we'll probably mostly be using these plastic ice scrapers today.

Just kind of sit through the sand and see if we can find anything without actually smashing any rocks open.

This is a statue of mary ann ng, the famous fossil collector from this region.

You can see she's holding an on the night.

This is what we're looking for today and there's plenty of them on the speech.

If you look in the right places.

Alright, we're gonna walk down the beach about 10 minutes in this direction because that's where the recent rockslide occurred and that's where all the fossils should be.

Got my trusty Tesco ice scraper.

So let's jump ice scraper.

Oh my God, not exactly indiana James, is it jesus?

Here's our first night of the day.

It's actually an impression of a nominate on the side of the road.

He was a really nice one.

You can see it really clearly in the side of the rock here.

Look at that jiminy christmas, that's a large fossil.

What's that then?

It's a piece of an outside ring And you can take that home.

How old is it?

200 million years old but still not as old as reiterate Just lying on top of the beach there's about 10 ammonites in there.

How much money we made?

Probably about £5.

So what you gotta do is pick those out carefully maybe using like a metal pick.

I don't know how to do it myself.

I've kind of got to look into it.

But yeah, look at all of them and they're golden because these have been fossilized in iron pyrite fool's Gold.

So if you clean this out nicely, you'll have some nice little golden ammonites fossil hunting tip.

Probably the best thing that I learned you want to look for areas of the beach that are covered in iron pyrite, that's these kind of greenish grayish rocks here and that's because the ocean has done most of the work for you and kind of sorted out the heavy parts of the sand and it's collected them all in one place and the ammonites are often made from iron pyrite.

So they will be heavy as well and you'll find them in these areas with concentrated iron pyrite.

So let's dig a little here and see if you can find anything without even digging.

I found about four of them already.

Look at that.

There's a couple in there.

There's another one on the side.

It really didn't take much effort once you found the iron pyrite, it was job done.

That's uh it's quite a big one there.

If we clean that out, How much can we sell that for £5? That fund my dream car on there.

This is nice.

This is, this is beautiful, this one, yeah, it's already cleaned out already.

I wonder if that's a Bella tonight.

That's exactly what I was asking myself earlier, there's more.

Look at all those.

That's a starlit night.

Welcome back to fossil club.

We're here on the beaches of Devon looking for some pyrite and some fossils and some trilobites while cliff quite literally crumbles behind us in the background.

It's pretty ominous.

This place.

The cliff is falling apart right behind us due to the heavy rainfall and the winds staying clear of over there.

So should you found another good patch here with a few of them and I found a 19 fifties Penny as well that might be worth something.

So in victorian times.

This area was actually a great big rubbish skip for victorian trash.

And so the whole beach is littered with iron and steel and whatever.

This is giving it something of a post apocalyptic vibe.

I mean there's a big brick wall sticking out from the cliff there that collapsed in the distance.

Like it's really cool for me.

I prefer that to the fossils going through and seeing what trinkets and things I can find charlotte's come to the fossils.

I've come to victorian gold, which is just horrible looking steel like a baby jackpot sean.

I found something not at am annoyed.

Huh pledge careful.

There's rusty stuff in your hands.

Somebody stole the scrapers.

There's another scraper.

Well they're all stuck together.

Cool.

They found some babies.

Very much God you're getting really messy.

I feel like I've just come out of a river show wet despite the water.

Found a really cool rock And yesterday when we were on the tour guide told us to look for a Ufo shaped rock kind of like an elliptical shape.

I found this one that is very much um, can we crack it open definitely.

I haven't tried cracking one open yet so we might as well try one.

She's been dying to get the hammer out.

Take out all her stress on the rocks.

The glitz and glamour of fossil hunting.

This is mental.

I'm glad you've got goggles on I don't oh my God it's such a weird shape.

I don't know where to crack it.

Pro is taking over.

You can smell like the burning gonna come in prison.

Prison break.

It's not having any luck.

Is he break my Helen.

Nice clean one you gave up on the other one.

There's lots of iron pyrite here.

So this is a good area to.

Iron pirate.

I'm pirate watch this because there's so much iron.

Iron Pirate there's fucking iron just in general.

Oh that's a big one.

Well you're digging paid off.

That's a really cool imprint.

Look at that one.

Alright I think I'm going to wrap up the fossil hunting here.

Head back to Alright we are back from our fossil hunting adventure and I'm really excited to show you guys all the fossils we found.

I'm shocked at the number there were I caught lots of comments saying that it's pretty hard to find anything.

Don't be disappointed if you don't find anything on your trip.

So I really wasn't expecting to find that many.

But as you saw in the video we found lots and that was only a very small percentage of all the fossils we found.

So I'm gonna show you guys everything.

And I also wanted to just give you some quick, easy tips if you want to go and do some fossil hunting for yourselves.

So tips wise.

Number one.

Be very careful.

Um The cliffs are very dangerous.

So don't go anywhere near the cliffs.

When you're fossil hunting stay closer to the water.

The cliffs are constantly breaking down and there have been some really major rock slides in the area.

So stay as far away from the cliffs as you can and don't try to dig any fossils out of the cliffs themselves.

Just wait until they naturally the road and fall out onto the beach where you can easily just pick them up off the sound as you saw in the video.

Also as I mentioned, time times, make sure you have a chart of the tide times for the day and head out to start your fossil hunting maybe an hour or two before low tide so that the tide is on its way out and you have plenty of time to search and get back to safety before the tide is fully in because the water does come right up to the top of the beach and you would get stuck out there if you are out there too late.

So be very careful of the tide times.

And again, the iron pyrite fossils are the most common it seems.

And the easiest way to find them is to search for those little patches of iron pyrite on the beach that the ocean has naturally sifted together for you.

I guarantee if you look in one of those areas long enough, you will find one at least if you go during peak fossil hunting season, which is what we did.

Apparently winter is the best time to go.

I think that's just because there are less people out there.

So more fossils for you to find and the weather is a lot rougher.

Rainier.

It's eroding the cliffs a lot faster than it does in the summer.

So if you would like to be able to easily find something highly recommend the winter and it's recommended to go out hunting a day following a big windy rainy storm.

That is when you will see the most fossils on the beach.

As for tools you saw, we just use like a £2 scraper thingy that we found at Tesco.

Really anything that you can just use to kind of dig through the sand, you don't want to be sticking your hands down there because there's lots of sharp pieces of glass and metal and it's really dangerous.

If you want to use your hands, make sure you have some safety gloves on, you could do it that way.

But yeah, I recommend a little scraper thing that worked really well.

You can bring a hammer and a chisel if you'd like to get into smashing rocks open to look for fossils.

But it does require some knowledge to know which types of rocks will have a fossil inside.

I'm not really on that because we didn't get into practicing that at all.

But if you go on one of the guided fossil tours with the museum like me and kristen, you can ask them all kinds of questions and they will teach you what kind of rocks to look for if you're into doing some rock smashing.

But it was really easy to just find fossils that were lying there without much effort really other than just looking really carefully with your eyes because they are quite small as you will see.

Okay, let me show you guys what we found.

So this is everything that we found.

I haven't counted them probably about 40 pieces in total.

Some of these big ones are the first ones that we found because they were so massive and easy to spot.

Unfortunately they're not whole specimens.

They're just a piece probably of the outside of the ammonites.

But imagine how big that would be if it was a whole one and their iron pyrite.

So these are heavy.

This is a solid piece of iron.

I really hope that I can figure a way to clean these off, Take off all this extra iron that has attached to the side of it and polish them up.

I'm gonna have to do some research on Youtube.

But like I said, there's tons of videos teaching you how to do it.

So I should be able to figure something out.

This one is really interesting.

There are so many little ammonites in here, No clue how many really until I start to dig them out.

But there's probably at least 20 over here is our collection of iron pyrite.

The golden Ami nights Again, tons in that little piece there lots of really nice ones that just need a little bit of work to clear out the centers.

I'm so happy that we found so many perfectly shaped ones.

That one's really good.

It's kind of a rusty color.

I don't know if it's gone rusty or why that one's different.

All the other ones are quite yellow but that one's only that one's kind of orange.

We do that one too.

This one here is probably the biggest full on a night that we found.

And again, these only sell for a couple of pounds in the shop and that's once they're all polished up and nice.

They're not really worth anything in their natural state like this.