Cold Ash Quarry
Protected area in Berkshire, England
Cold Ash Quarry is a 0.4-hectare (0.99-acre) geological Site of Special Scientific Interest north of Newbury in Berkshire. It is a Geological Conservation Review site.
The quarry is unique in Britain for the collection of fossil plants and insects which occur in a layer of silt and clay within the Reading Beds. The fossils date to about 60 million years ago. The fossil flora consists of well-preserved angiosperm leaves, in some of these fossils there is evidence of the activity of contemporary leaf-miner insects. This is the only location in Britain at which fossil leaf-miner activity have been discovered.
The site is private land with no public access.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Cold Ash Quarry”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Cold Ash Quarry.jpg by Dudley Miles, CC BY-SA 4.0
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