Diggin' the past

Still an embarrassment

 So it turns out, you can use Google Earth   for more than looking at it to see people   jogging in their underwear, or goofy signs,   or the one time I put all the recycling out   in beer boxes and the camera car came   by that very morning. 

 There are better uses for Google Earth!

Just ask amateur paleontologists Neville and Sally Hollingworth, who were sitting around in July, 2021, bored as only amateur paleontologists can be during a COVID lockdown.  What they did, they got on Google Earth, looking for archeological sites to examine, and made the biggest find ever!

Neville is 60. He and his wife are British. He's been into this since he found a fossil at age 12, a discovery that led him to wind up with a Pd.D. in Geology.  So he knows what he's doing when he goes online to look at images of a limestone quarry in Cotswolds, England.

Next thing you know, Neville and Sally spotted more than 1,000 fossils from the Jurassic Period.

Just from the satellite images, he could tell that a certain area in Gloucestershire had lots of ancient remnants just below the surface, the same way that I look on Earth on hot days in July to find which neighbors have swimming pools.  And then, once the lockdown was lifted, the Hollingworths went to the site and found - get this - a treasure trove dating back 167 million years, full of fossilized starfish, brittle stars, and feather stars.

That is the the oldest discovery of Jurassic echinoderms ever found in the United Kingdom. At first, officials kept the excavation site a strict secret so that every Nigel, Reginald, and Clive wouldn't come trooping up looking for old stuff.

In addition to sharing all this now, British scientists have revealed that the dig turned up three new species of feather star, brittle star, and sea cucumber, although you have to bring your own salad.

The remains of five mammoths - two adults, two juveniles and an infant - were unearthed as the site they're now calling "Jurassic Pompei," and the hunch is that there may be many more bones down in the old quarry.

One romantic touch for you today:  The Hollingworths only recently got married, and they cut their cake with a Neanderthal hand axe found at the site. They were thrilled to be using a tool untouched by other hands for 200,000 years!