Interesting Specimen

Our Shropshire Hills Through Time exhibition starts in the Silurian era and we are always fascinated by the history of our beautiful area.

A visitor brought this interesting specimen to us last week. It’s a fossil of a brachio-pod mollusc. Brachiopods have a very long history of life on Earth; at least 550 million years. They first appear as fossils in rocks of earliest Cambrian age and their de-scendants survive, albeit relatively rarely, in today’s oceans and seas.

This specimen is an example of fossils found in the Silurian rocks in Shropshire and is likely over 400 million years old.