Most of what has been dug up around this city lived in the sea: 1,277 of 1,385 recorded fossils, against 84 from land. The rock database we use for the wider region does not reach Britain, so the fossils answer on their own here. But the most interesting age on this page is 66 million years ago, where 24 of the 39 fossils — about 62 in every 100 — have no environment recorded at all. They were found and catalogued; the field that would say where they lived is simply empty.
The answer, age by age
Five ages in the past of this place, each one a window rather than a day. Each says which witness spoke — and where our evidence cannot answer yet, it says that too.
“Ma” means millions of years ago. The dashed mark means our sources have nothing for that age — which is a finding, not a fault.
The fossils we have, and the question they were never asked
What the record holds
1,277 of the fossils near this city lived in the sea and 84 lived on land. That is a strong lean, and it is a lean in what has been FOUND.
The fullest age — around 150 million years ago
842 fossils near this city have an age range containing this moment (758 from the sea, 84 from land). Nothing corroborates them at the regional scale: the rock database has no column here.
The empty field — around 66 million years ago
24 of the 39 fossils at this age have no environment recorded. Somebody found each one and wrote it down; the box for where it lived was left blank.
That third card is the one worth stopping on. It is a kind of not-knowing that is easy to miss. It is not that the rock is gone, and it is not that nobody has dug here. The fossil is in a museum drawer with a label on it. The label just does not answer the question this page is asking.
A database is a record of what people wrote down, and people write down what they were interested in at the time. When a field is blank it is worth asking who filled the form in, and what they were trying to find out — which is usually not the thing you want to know.
Travel back in time
The plate model places this ground at every age on this page, each time well south of where it sits now. The rows below are the model’s answer, not a photograph, and the spread between models grows as they go back.
250
million years agojump to the evidence250 million years ago, the plate model puts this ground about 15° north of the equator. This is one of the ages the models argue about most: published reconstructions put it as much as 6.3° of latitude apart, which is several hundred kilometres. Treat it as one model's answer, not a photograph.
200
million years agojump to the evidence200 million years ago, the plate model puts this ground about 20° north of the equator. Published models disagree by about 4.3° of latitude here — a few hundred kilometres — so it is one model's answer, not a photograph.
150
million years agojump to the evidence150 million years ago, the plate model puts this ground about 26° north of the equator. Published models disagree by about 4.3° of latitude here — a few hundred kilometres — so it is one model's answer, not a photograph.
100
million years agojump to the evidence100 million years ago, the plate model puts this ground about 36° north of the equator. This is one of the ages the models argue about most: published reconstructions put it as much as 5.4° of latitude apart, which is several hundred kilometres. Treat it as one model's answer, not a photograph.
66
million years agojump to the evidence66 million years ago, the plate model puts this ground about 47° north of the equator. Published models disagree by about 3.7° of latitude here — a few hundred kilometres — so it is one model's answer, not a photograph.
What was the water doing?
Five ages, oldest first. Each one has two kinds of witness — the rock of the wider region, and the fossils dug up near the city — and they are kept apart on purpose, because they are answers to different questions.
Each age here is a marker on the timeline, not a single day. The evidence that belongs to it comes with an age range of its own that overlaps the marker — so it can tell you what this stretch of time was like, and never what was happening on one exact date.
Our evidence has no witness here
Around 250 million years ago
250 million years ago, the plate model puts this ground about 15° north of the equator. This is one of the ages the models argue about most: published reconstructions put it as much as 6.3° of latitude apart, which is several hundred kilometres. Treat it as one model's answer, not a photograph.
An open question
Neither of the evidence sources we use can answer this one: the regional rock database does not cover this place at all, so it has nothing to say about 250 million years ago, and no fossil dug up nearby covers that age either. That is a real gap in the evidence, not a gap in the past — and saying so is more useful than guessing.
Only the fossils speak
Around 200 million years ago
200 million years ago, the plate model puts this ground about 20° north of the equator. Published models disagree by about 4.3° of latitude here — a few hundred kilometres — so it is one model's answer, not a photograph.
The rock of the region
The regional rock record does not cover this place at all, so there is no regional answer for 200 million years ago.
The fossils dug up nearby
22 fossils dug up near Hull have an age range covering 200 million years ago: 22 from the sea, 0 from land. The closest of them was found about 21 km away — near the city, never under it.
Only the fossils speak
Around 150 million years ago
150 million years ago, the plate model puts this ground about 26° north of the equator. Published models disagree by about 4.3° of latitude here — a few hundred kilometres — so it is one model's answer, not a photograph.
The rock of the region
The regional rock record does not cover this place at all, so there is no regional answer for 150 million years ago.
The fossils dug up nearby
12 fossils dug up near Hull have an age range covering 150 million years ago: 12 from the sea, 0 from land. The closest of them was found about 30 km away — near the city, never under it.
Only the fossils speak
Around 100 million years ago
100 million years ago, the plate model puts this ground about 36° north of the equator. This is one of the ages the models argue about most: published reconstructions put it as much as 5.4° of latitude apart, which is several hundred kilometres. Treat it as one model's answer, not a photograph.
The rock of the region
The regional rock record does not cover this place at all, so there is no regional answer for 100 million years ago.
The fossils dug up nearby
140 fossils dug up near Hull have an age range covering 100 million years ago: 140 from the sea, 0 from land. The closest of them was found about 15 km away — near the city, never under it.
Only the fossils speak
Around 66 million years ago
66 million years ago, the plate model puts this ground about 47° north of the equator. Published models disagree by about 3.7° of latitude here — a few hundred kilometres — so it is one model's answer, not a photograph.
The rock of the region
The regional rock record does not cover this place at all, so there is no regional answer for 66 million years ago.
The fossils dug up nearby
26 fossils dug up near Hull have an age range covering 66 million years ago: 26 from the sea, 0 from land. The closest of them was found about 41 km away — near the city, never under it.
What was dug up nearby?
Every fossil below was dug up somewhere around Hull, never underneath it, so each carries the distance to where it was actually found. Watch for the ones with no environment recorded: they are not missing, and they are not a mistake — the record simply does not say where that animal lived.
Around 66 million years ago
A Terebratulina gracilis from around this time (its own age range is 72.2–83.6 million years) was dug up about 32 km from here, in Norfolk.
A Terebratulina chrysalis from around this time (its own age range is 72.2–83.6 million years) was dug up about 32 km from here, in Norfolk.
A Rugia tenuicostata from around this time (its own age range is 72.2–83.6 million years) was dug up about 32 km from here, in Norfolk.
Around 100 million years ago
A Protosqualus sigei from around this time (its own age range is 106.3–110.1 million years) was dug up about 15 km from here, in the Hunstanton.
A Synechodus dubrisiensis from around this time (its own age range is 106.3–110.1 million years) was dug up about 15 km from here, in the Hunstanton.
A Gladioserratus aptiensis from around this time (its own age range is 106.3–110.1 million years) was dug up about 15 km from here, in the Hunstanton.
Around 150 million years ago
An Achistrum monochordata from around this time (its own age range is 154.8–157.9 million years) was dug up about 14 km from here, in the Ampthill Clay.
An Achistrum monochordata from around this time (its own age range is 154.8–157.9 million years) was dug up about 14 km from here, in the Ampthill Clay.
An Achistrum gamma from around this time (its own age range is 154.8–157.9 million years) was dug up about 14 km from here, in the Ampthill Clay.
Around 200 million years ago
A Coleopteron from 200 million years ago was dug up about 21 km from here.
An Insecta from 200 million years ago was dug up about 21 km from here.
A Cytherelloidea circumscripta from 200 million years ago was dug up about 22 km from here.
We show these places to the nearest few kilometres rather than pinning them exactly. The scientists who recorded them know the spot far better than that — the full record is one click away in the Paleobiology Database, and it is free for anyone to read. We round them here because a map made for children is not a map for digging things up, not because anything is being hidden.
What changed?
This ground has moved a long way north. The plate model puts it in the northern tropics at the oldest age this page can place, and at its present latitude today.
The rock at the surface today is younger than all of it. The geological map of this exact point returns Mesozoic sedimentary rocks (Late Cretaceous), Late Cretaceous limestone (Late Cretaceous), White Chalk Subgroup (Late Cretaceous).
This page says nothing about the estuary, the coast or how either was formed. We have no source for that, so we do not guess.
Try it yourself
The sea creatures in this record lived in water, and that water is still here, still going round. Some of it is in the glass beside you.
This is a good page for what a BLANK in the data means. Most fossils here lived in the sea, and at one age most of the finds have no environment recorded at all. A blank is not a zero and it is not a secret — it is a question nobody answered when the record was made.
If a fossil’s record does not say where the animal lived, what could you look at to work it out — and who would you have to ask?
How sure are we?
Column facts describe an area of thousands to tens of thousands of km², centred tens of kilometres from the town coordinate. They are claims about a region, never about the rock beneath the town.
Fossil facts are a bounding-box sample around the town, each with its own distance from it; a fossil is never "here". The absence of fossils is not evidence of the absence of life — only of the absence of a recorded, published dig in this box.
Positions are model outputs, not observations. Independent plate models disagree by hundreds of kilometres at these ages, and that spread is the honest size of the uncertainty.
The land/sea question is answered only by the regional rock and the local fossils, separately, and never by the reconstruction — which says where this ground was and cannot say whether it was wet. There is deliberately no single field holding a one-word answer, because answering in one word would require merging a regional claim with a local one (CLAUDE.md rule 5). The nearby fossils are reported as a census of what has been found — which kinds are present, and how many of each — and never counted into a verdict: occurrence records are not statistically equivalent observations, so a plurality of them cannot establish an environment (science review, 2026-08-30).
Fossils are binned to their nearest slice age by age-range midpoint, with boundaries at the inter-slice midpoints 83, 125, 175 and 225 Ma. Those boundaries are an editorial choice, not a published stratigraphic scheme; a reviewer may prefer stage boundaries. Every occurrence keeps its own age range so the choice can be re-examined.
Sources
Macrostrat — the rock of the regionRead from version 2.3.9 of its data service on 30 August 2026.Peters, S.E. et al. Macrostrat: a platform for geological data integration and deep-time research. https://macrostrat.org, accessed on (date)Palaeogeography: Wright, N., Zahirovic, S., Müller, R. D., and Seton, M. Towards community-driven paleogeographic reconstructions: integrating open-access paleogeographic and paleobiology data with plate tectonics. Biogeosciences 10:1529-1541
The Paleobiology Database — the fossils dug up nearbyPBDB publishes no dataset version string; the data-service path (data1.2) and the datainfo access_time bound this claim.Fossil occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database (https://paleobiodb.org), released under CC0 1.0.Palaeo-coordinate cross-check (Paleobiology Database `pgm=gplates`): Wright et. al., 2013; Towards community-driven paleogeographic reconstructions.Palaeo-coordinate cross-check (Paleobiology Database `pgm=scotese`): Scotese, C.R., 2021. An Atlas of Paleogeographic Maps: The Seas Come In and the Seas Go Out, Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences, v. 49, p. 669-718.Palaeo-coordinate cross-check (Paleobiology Database `pgm=seton`): Seton et. al., 2012; Global continental and ocean basin reconstructions since 200 Ma.
The EarthByte plate model — where this ground used to beMULLER2019 version 3.0, run with pyGPlates 1.0.0, licensed CC BY 4.0.GPlates: Müller, R. D., Cannon, J., Qin, X., Watson, R. J., Gurnis, M., Williams, S., Pfaffelmoser, T., Seton, M., Russell, S. H. J., Zahirovic S. (2018). GPlates: Building a virtual Earth through deep time. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 19, 2243-2261. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GC007584Reconstructions computed with the GPlates Web Service (EarthByte Group, The University of Sydney).Plate model: Müller, R. D., Zahirovic, S., Williams, S. E., Cannon, J., Seton, M., Bower, D. J., Tetley, M. G., Heine, C., Le Breton, E., Liu, S., Russell, S. H. J., Yang, T., Leonard, J., and Gurnis, M. (2019), A global plate model including lithospheric deformation along major rifts and orogens since the Triassic. Tectonics, vol. 38, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018TC005462. Licensed CC BY 4.0.Plate model: Zahirovic, S., Eleish, A., Doss, S., Pall, J., Cannon, J., Pistone, M., Tetley, M. G., Young, A., & Fox, P. (2022). Subduction kinematics and carbonate platform interactions. Geoscience Data Journal, 9(2), p.371-383. Licensed CC BY 4.0.Coastline and static-polygon data by the EarthByte Group, licensed CC BY 3.0 Unported.
This record was assembled on from the datasets above. The ancient positions are reconstructions from a published plate model, not observations.