I write this while sitting on Charmouth beach in Dorset with my required reading of the Saturday Guardian, as I do regularly. Your editorial (The Guardian view on the export of fossils: they deserve national treasure status, 21 August) produced a hollow laugh as – this being the centre of fossil hunting on the Jurassic Coast – I am surrounded by armies of hammer-wielding tourists busy smashing the daylights out of any rock available around them. The vast majority have no idea which stone types are likely to bear fossils and don’t report any finds even if they are lucky. Others take carrier bags full of stones back to their cars.
Thus, we have no idea what fossils are being lost to the record every single day here, and so I completely support the suggestion of giving them legal protection. Of course, amateur collecting has a valuable place in unearthing important fossil finds, but only if they are shared and documented. The Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre valiantly tries to educate and inform visitors, but sadly these will inevitably be the minority.
Charmouth is a key part of the designated Jurassic Coast world heritage site, but I can’t think of any others where visitors are allowed, or even encouraged, to bring or rent hammers to wreck the protected features and/or remove them from the site unrecorded. If we want to protect our fossil heritage for future generations to study, we could make a start by regulating this geological vandalism.
Jill White
Musbury, Devon
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