What an old fossil

From a kamikaze ichthyosaur to a gigantic shell with sinister tentacles, Britain teems with fascinating fossils. Simon de Bruxelles meets the collectors following in Mary Anning’s footsteps

- Simon de Bruxelles

BIZARRE, sinuous shapes twist and turn, intertwining in a mass that looks impossible to disentangle. It may look as if the woodwind players of an infernal orchestra abandoned their instruments as they left the stage, but these are the remains of some of the earth’s strangest creatures: heteromorph ammonites.

We know ammonites are the fossilised shells of extinct creatures that lived millions of years ago. Once the ocean’s dominant form of life, they are the spiral shells that pioneering 19th-century fossil hunter Mary Anning collected and sold ‘on the seashore’ in Lyme Regis in Dorset, transforming our understanding of the history of life on our planet.

Fast forward to today and Wolfgang Grulke has spent many of his 76 years collecting the fossils that fill the private museum beside his home in Dorset. It includes the unique conglomeration of 18 species of heteromorph ammonite he found in the Alpes-de-HauteProvence in the south of France. Three times in their several hundred million-year existence, ammonites uncoiled and formed new shapes unlike anything before or since. No one knows why, although Mr Grulke believes this sudden transformation was probably triggered by a virus or other external cause.

Mr Grulke has 500 million years of fossils arranged in chronological order in the cabinets that line the walls of the converted barn that he and his wife, Terri, bought from a descendant of Anning’s brother, Joseph, having seen it in COUNTRY LIFE.