A six-year-old boy in Britain found a 488-million-year-old fossil while digging in his garden with a kit he received as a Christmas present. The British media tell the story. Siddak Sing Jhamat, aka Sid, was digging in his garden in Walsall, West Midlands, “looking for worms, pottery shards and bricks”, when he came across an object that was shaped like a horn or a tooth or a claw.
Intrigued, Sid showed it to his father who posted the photo on the Facebook account of a group of fossil enthusiasts to which he belongs. Result, it is a Rugosa coral dating back to about 251-488 million years ago, to the Paleozoic era. A time when all continents were massed into Pangea and England, in particular, was under water.
Sid’s family now hopes that the University of Birmingham Geology Museum will take an interest in their baby boy discovery.
