Boy, 5, finds proof of South Wales village’s coral reef past
BACK in September, five-year-old William Yandle from Caerphilly had just started school.
One day when he was out with his “nanny” when he found an object that would teach him more about his village than he could ever have expected: a 300 million-year-old fossil.
William had found fossil coral on the site of the old Windsor Colliery in Abertridwr, which closed in 1986.
It was from a time when Wales was under water, covered by a tropical sea.
His mum, Suzanne, was left stunned.
“He’s always finding rocks,” she said. “He’s always picking them up and brings them home.
“My mother-in-law saw that [fossil] and said it’s pretty and took it home.
“We’re quite familiar with fossils and we’ve been fossil hunting a few times in Penarth and Barry, but nothing like that.
“I thought it was quite interesting. But it had been sitting on my kitchen shelf.
“Yesterday, I thought I’d look into it. I Googled and was looking to find out. I came across the Natural History Museum, so I emailed.
“I had a response within two hours.”
An email from the museum in London reads: “These are fossil corals. The radiating lines are the septa (walls) of the calyx (cup) where the polyp or polyps lived.
“The rocks in your area are Carboniferous
– 300 to 360 million years old.
“Your specimen is probably from a formation nearby.
“Coral reefs at certain times in the Carboniferous extended over large parts of Britain and Europe.” During the Carboniferous period 359-327 million years ago, the Mendip area in Somerset was a shallow, tropical sea which stretched all the way to Pembrokshire. Successions of Carboniferous limestone were deposited, which formed the Mendip hills. Cindy Howells, a curator of palaeontology at the Museum of Wales, said: “Wales, South Wales particularly, and parts of England were covered by a shallow, tropical sea, probably like the Caribbean today.
“We were pretty much on the equator at the time, so it would have been quite nice.
“There was lots of coral.
“It’s one of the most common fossils we find in Wales from that time.
“We do find them and they’re lovely when they’re found as they tell us about the environment at that time. Sometimes we use the growth lines to tell us the length of the day and the month.”
Suzanne said: “I told William but he’s blase about it.
“The concept of time is not quite there yet but he knows it’s a long time ago.
“He wasn’t looking for it but he came across it.
“He hasn’t said he wants to go back but he loves fossils and dinosaurs.”
And what does he want to do when he grows up?
“He wants to be a paleontologist or a firefighter,” Suzanne said. “I said do both!”