A’fossiling We Will Go

We are, so to speak, right down the road from a really cool trackway – the fossilized footprints of a dinosaur from 200 million years ago. The trackway is in the Bendricks, “a stretch of coastline and an important paleontological site in the Vale of Glamorgan in south Wales located along the northern coast of the Bristol Channel between Barry and Sully”. 

Basically, you can prance on down the Wales coast path and have yourself a looky-loo at dinosaur tracks. We thought, “Okay, then. Let’s do that.” Especially since the coast path is beautiful. Here’s just one of the lesser scenic bits:

local footpath

And thus it was that the Kramers did walk to the Bendricks, and lo it was lovely:

shale beach PANO

It was an easy mile or so along a nicely maintained footpath on a warm day with enough cooling wind to keep you from getting overheated. I swear, Wales is trying to impress up. It is succeeding.

shale beach

We thought that such an important piece of prehistoric evidence would be marked – covered with plexiglass, roped off, have a sign by it, SOMETHING – especially since some pack of stupid asshats vandalized them in 2014. We thought wrong. We looked high and low for those fossils and nary a one did we discover.

We did, however, find a big ol’ rusty anchor off a big ol’ ocean liner:

Bigass rusty anchor

There was also the pleasure of walking around in the fresh air and smelling the salt sea. The girls went splashing about in the shallows, and seashells were found.

Shale beach with Barry in background

Yep, even without seeing the vaunted dino prints, it was still worth the walk to go there. My daughters enjoyed it; that’s good enough for me.

The trackway was featured in a BBC TV series about the Natural History of Wales.