Where: England, United Kingdom (51.0° N, 0.1° W: paleocoordinates 41.9° N, 9.3° E)

• coordinate based on nearby landmark

• local area-level geographic resolution

When: Hastings Group, Berriasian to Berriasian (145.5 - 136.4 Ma)

• "The strata of Tilgate forest consist of various layers of sandstone and schistose calcareous sandstone lying on a bed of blue clay of considerable thickness. They emerge from beneath the upper beds of the iron sandstone; and the blue clay, on which they repose, is succeeded by beds of that formation. They traverse the county of Sussex in a direction nearly north-east and south-west: Horsham being their western, and Hastings their eastern boundary. The following section of a quarry in the vicinity of the forest will serve to convey a general idea of the whole.

•1. (The lowermost bed) A blue tenacious clay, destitute of fossils depth unknown.

•2. Compact blueish gray sandstone divided by horizontal seams of blue marl, into layers from 3 to 12 inches in thickness. This bed is about 9 feet thick. It contains the bones of two species of turtle, of a crocodile, a plesiosaurus, a megalosaurus, a cetaceous animal, probably a whale, of birds, and the vegetables about to be described. The upper layers are a compact conglomerate; but the lower are perfectly homogeneous, and contain shells, such as are found in the Sussex marble, and figured by Sowerby as a Vivipara.

•3. Yellow sand and soft calcareous sandstone, alternating with thin layers of sandstone slate 7 feet thick, contains bones and teeth of crocodiles and some unknown animals, fishes, turtles, birds, carbonized wood, vegetables, and casts of univalves and bivalves.

•4. A coarse aggregate of quartz, limestone, and sandstone pebbles, and immense quantities of comminuted bones and teeth of fishes, the whole loosely held together by a coarse grit. It varies in thickness from 3 to 6 feet."

• group-level stratigraphic resolution

Environment/lithology: marine; pebbly, yellow, blue, calcareous siliciclastic sediments

Size class: macrofossils

Preservation: replaced with carbon

Collected by Mantell; reposited in the BMNH

Collection methods: quarrying, surface (in situ), mechanical,

Primary reference: G. A. Mantell. 1824. Description of some fossil vegetables of the Tilgate Forest in Sussex. Transactions of the Geological Society of London, series 2 1:421-424 [M. Carrano/H. Street] more details

Purpose of describing collection: general faunal/floral analysis

PaleoDB collection 100136: authorized by Matt Carrano, entered by Hallie Street on 30.11.2010, edited by Roger Benson

Creative Commons license: CC BY (attribution)