It's astounding what can wash up on the sea-shores along the North West, as two amateur Derry archaeologists discovered recently.
Eddie Harkin and Tommy Gallagher are already well known to 'Journal' readers thanks to their dedication and passion for unearthing evidence of the past.
Now Eddie Harkin is thrilled to have found a stunning fossilised coral while he and Tommy w
ere out searching for ancient flints at Tullagh Bay in Clonmany - a coral which has since been identified as being over 300 million years old!
"We came across this and weren't sure what it was," Eddie Harkin told the 'Journal' this week, "We knew it was a fossilised stone but had no idea what would cause the strange markings all over it. At first I thought they might be barnacles but when we touched it we knew that it was fossilised stone.
"It's really interesting to look at, like some kind of moon-rock, so we took photos and sent them off to an expert to see what he thought," he said.
Last week Eddie received a letter from Dr Mike Simms, Curator of Palaeontology at the Ulster Museum, stating that this shiny black stone was no ordinary rock.
According to Dr Simms, the specimen was "clearly a limestone pebble containing part of a fossil colonial coral, of a type called Siphonodendron."
"This particular coral is common in limestones of Carboniferous age (-340 million years ago), deposited at a time when much of Ireland was submerged beneath shallow tropical seas close to the equator.... ice movements during the last Ice Age could easily have transported it a considerable distance from its source," the letter said.
Eddie added: "We couldn't believe it that it dates from a time long before the dinosaurs and was carried in ice from around the equator during the last ice age to where we found it in Tullagh Bay.
"All this talk about global warming - if only that wee stone could talk - he'd tell some stories having travelled all this way!"
