Gotland has a fascinating geological history. The bedrock of the ancient “Baltica” plate that forms Scandinavia was located close to the equator and covered by ocean. During the Silurian age great coral reefs grew in this area and it was teeming with sealife. Clay washed down from nearby land and shells formed limestone, resulting in a rich strata of fossils.

Most of the Silurian era bedrock is now eroded or covered over. The island of Gotland however is formed by a giant peice of this bedrock. We learned that if you know where to look, you can find plenty of fossils along the sea cliffs.

What could be more fun than hunting for fossils in the wild? One afternoon we bought a local geology book and set out on an expedition.

Carter read the book carefully and discovered that the fishing hamlet of Djupvik on the southwest coast had fossils along a stretch of cliffs “about 10 minutes walk from the Sandhamn camping site.” Typical finds included sunstones (heliotropes – pieces of old coral), now extinct rugose corals, stromatoporoids (sponges), bivalves, even a few trilobytes.

We drove off and after a few wrong turns and dirt roads, we found the spot.

As we walked along the beach, we could see the cliffs down the shore. They were about 20 feet high and made of clay, with plenty of embedded sharp rocks (and we hoped a few fossils) sticking right out of them.

We wanted a closer look, but the beach ended and there was not much of a path forward along the cliffs. The ground beneath was a gray clay that sloped steeply toward the water. Due to recent rain, the cliff face was dripping and the clay wet. The first few inches of ground were bare but the rest was covered by thick brown seaweed crawling with bugs that smelled strongly of fish. The ocean was high and washed right into the seaweed a few yards out.

Carter and I guessed that any really cool fossils would be well away from the traffic of the beach. We determined to hug the cliff face and slide out as far as we could, hoping to spot an exposed trilobite fossil.

After about thirty meters though, it became too slippery to walk. All the fossils we did see were too deeply set into the cliff to extract without tools. We returned to the beach empty-handed.

Luckily, Gina and Katherine had discovered that a few fossils were mixed in among the stones near the beach. With another hour, we discovered twenty or more small finds. None of these were notable from a museum viewpoint, yet they were all special because we had found them.

After admiring the collection, we selected the best few (a sunstone, a sponge, and a few tiny bivalves) as keepsakes. Then we washed off the mud from our adventures and returned home, triumphant from our afternoon of treasure hunting on the ancient exposed shores of Gotland.