We are pleased to offer a range of walks and visits for schools and educational groups all year round!
Educational fossil walks
Our educational tours are £2.50 per child for a 1 hour tour, £5 per child for a 2 hour tour. All supervising adults are free.
In terms of locations we offer Compton/Brook Bays and Shanklin Chine.
Compton Bay
Our walk at Compton/Brook Bays is our most popular trip and is a classic Isle of Wight fossil hunting experience! With a wide diversity of fossils to be found, from dinosaur bones to flint sea urchins, you definitely won’t go away empty handed! The highlight of this walk is the famous dinosaur foot-casts and trackways that can be seen in the Wessex Formation at Hanover Point! We’ll explore the dinosaur footprints, discuss how they formed, the different dinosaur tracks we can find and what they can tell us about life on the dinosaur-rich Isle of Wight 130 million years ago!! It is a fantastic experience for children and adults alike!
Shanklin Chine
Shanklin Chine focuses on the 115 million year old fossils of the Lower Greensand, deposited in a shallow coastal sea during the mid-Cretaceous. We move along the beach in search of a variety of fossils including ammonites, quartz crystals, fossil driftwood, shell nodules, coprolites and very rare bones from dinosaurs and marine reptiles! It can be a brilliant walk and we usually find some fantastic and diverse fossils in very large amounts!
School visits
For Isle of Wight schools, we offer free school visits! These will include a short talk, followed by handling of real fossils from the island. With the option of a short fossil tooth activity as well!
Visits to mainland schools will require the cost of travel covered by the school.
These can be tailored to different aspects of the syllabus, age appropriate etc. Just let us know what you would like!
Home School Groups
For the home schooling community, we offer the same educational rates on our fossil walks for organised groups. As well as the option for a hour’s talk, fossil handling and a build your own fossil collection activity!
Visits are free, but there will be a additional charge for the fossil collection activity.
Workshops
We also offer workshops for small groups of enthusiastic children and adults! These workshops introduce you to new skills and questions palaeontologists ask, coming away looking at the fossils and geology in another light!
Dinosaur footprint workshop
Learning about dinosaur footprint formation, how to identify which dinosaurs made which footprint. A exercise measuring every foot cast on the beach and coming together to work out the size of the biggest and smallest dinosaurs. And if the sand allows, drawing the dinosaurs to scale to get a real idea of size! As well as a hands on activity recreating our own dinosaur foot casts with Plaster of Paris!
Flint fossils workshop
Learning about chalk and flint formation, all the different fossils we can find in flint stones. We then spend a hour searching and logging as many fossils as we can find. We then discuss our finds, and what they tell us about life in the chalk seas. But also what is missing from our finds, what biases would be created if using only flint fossils to interpret the chalk sea environment?
Introduction to Geology and Sedimentary Logging
This will be a introduction to basic sedimentary geology, identifying different rock types and structures we see, and what environments they indicate. As well as learning how geologists draw sedimentary logs and sketches of outcrops. This workshop is aimed at 16yrs +, and requires everyone to bring along a notebook (preferably blank or squared paper), pens and a tape measure.
For any questions or to book your educational visit/walk please fill in the booking form below: