Million-Year-Old Surprises from New Excavations at Westbury Cave

Monday 7th February, 6pm GMT

Speaker: Neil Adams (Oxford University Museum of Natural History; University of Leicester)

Britain has a famously rich Ice Age fossil record, which documents the responses of animals and plants to successive cycles between cold glacial periods and warm interglacials. However, fossil sites older than about 750,000 years are very rare in the UK. As a result, very little is known about the fauna, flora and environments in Britain during the late Early Pleistocene (1.8 to 0.8 million years ago), an important period of complex climate change. This talk will explore the new work being carried out at Westbury Cave in the Mendip Hills of Somerset, which contains sediments and fossils that have potential to partly fill this gap in the British fossil record. Among the new discoveries is the oldest hippo fossil known in the country, as well as a new assemblage of fossil mammals, large and small, that allow an unprecedented insight into British history around one million years ago.

This talk will be hosted via Zoom webinar. Please book your place using an email address you will check, as the Zoom link will be sent to that address shortly before the event (remember to check spam/junk/other folders in your inbox). You will not be seen on camera or heard on microphone during the session, but you will be invited to ask questions via the chat function on Zoom.

This talk is free to attend but we do ask for a suggested donation of £3. This is to cover the costs associated with hosting these online talks. If you are able to donate as part of attending this event, it will be very much appreciated.

We are thrilled to announce that we now have our very own Patreon channel (https://www.patreon.com/CreswellCrags), which is a subscription-based service that grants patrons many benefits and content as we create it.

One of the main things we'll be doing is uploading recordings of our livestreamed talks onto the service so anyone that misses out at the time can watch again at their leisure. We'll also have question and answer sessions for patrons, so if our content leaves you wanting to know more, you'll be able to ask us just like people who attended the live events. So if you're unable to attend live on Zoom, please consider subscribing!

At £4 a month, the Hare tier includes the videos of the livestreamed talks and works out cheaper than paying our suggested donation of £3 per fortnightly talk. Just copy and paste this link into your browser: https://www.patreon.com/CreswellCrags

Cover image: The Early Pleistocene sediments exposed in Westbury Cave during excavations in April 2016 (Neil Adams).