I was able to spend a lovely week in Portugal. In Lisbon, many of the buildings are composed of locally quarried limestone, so you can just look at the walls and see fossils. Sadly, they are mostly oyster fossils with very little detail. I didn't find anything rare or spectacular (but being in Portugal was spectacular enough!). This is a view of Magoita beach. It is rarely visited by tourists, and I am obliged to a Portuguese Fossil Forum member who told me about the place. As one can see, those are massive cliffs, and they date to the Cretaceous period. The deposits are all marine and mostly dominated by oyster shell fossils. I collected at the base of the cliffs where stuff would weather out. We were only there for two hours, so not a lot of time to find all that I wanted. On the way down to Magoita beach, I walked past the fossilized sand dunes - a world heritage site. These have all been hardened by several years of wind and surf. A closeup of the base of the cliffs. From the base of the cliffs again. At the bottom are some weathered out rocks. Some typical oyster shell fossils at the base of the cliff. A nice hash of more oyster shell fossils. A jumble of neat looking turitellid gastropods. Not a fossil, but a pretty cool looking and entirely desiccated little snake. Back in Lisbon, this is from the keep of the Castelos do Sao Jorge. Select pieces from the stuff I brought back home. The two on the right are oyster fossils : Ostrea sp. (Ostrea edulis?). The next one is a deer-heart kind of massive bivalve, possibly Pholadomya sp. Not sure about the clam on the far right, but clams are always a bit trickier to identify because they don't change much over millions of years. This last one is not mine (oh, if it were!). It is Eopelobates sp. on display at the Oceanarium in Lisbon.
John
7/31/2019 06:39:21 am
It's Magoito not Magoita ;) Comments are closed.
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Kane Faucher
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February 2024
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