Country diary: To the old quarry, for a Triassic quest | Fossils

AFinally, the sun shone after weeks of rain. While the distant Welsh hills were covered in snow, here on the Wirral the weather was dry and bright. Storeton Wood is secondary oak, beech and silver birch woodland, and formerly a quarry. Below, a copper layer of leaves protected the ground from the recent onslaught of raindrops. The fallen limbs were a mushroom feast; in places, creamy white Storeton sandstone showed through like discarded vertebrae. The great spotted woodpeckers drummed.

Standing next to the remains of George Stephenson’s quarry, I imagined the scene of 1838: workers busy quarrying sandstone, sudden cries of discovery and confusion, handprints in the rock. They thought they were signs of people who perished in Noah’s flood. Victorian scientists later confirmed they were the footprints of a crocodile-like creature named Chirotherium storetonense (Chirotherium meaning “hand beast”) dating from the Triassic period, there are 240 m summer.

At the time, the creature’s world may have been a lake in a hot desert on a European scale, the muddy edges preserving its impressions. Eventually slabs bearing the footprints were sent to several museums, and the Liverpool Natural History Society (sadly now defunct) offered 20 shillings to be distributed “among the quarry workers” for their discovery. The quarry, long filled with spoil from the construction of the first Mersey Tunnel, is now invisible, but time has caught up with the millennium when a replica of the Chirotherium was carved into the wall surrounding the wood, to celebrate the discovery.

I set off in search of the replica, crossing bumpy ground and fallen tree trunks, stopping to marvel at the mushrooms and beginning to fear that my quest would be in vain. Suddenly there was Chirotherium, glowing on the wall, much brighter than I had imagined. A delightful discovery, and its dimensions – reduced to those of a 2.5 meter long beast, with a long tail counterbalancing its movement – ​​left me imagining the original creature.

An archive of fossilized footprints sequestered since the Triassic; childhood memories of wonder at Stephenson’s Sankey Viaduct facing Storeton sandstone; the human need to mark the millennium etched in the very sandstone from which the fossils emerged. A sunny trip to Storeton Wood had turned into a trip back in time.