‘Part-time adventurers’: amateur fossil hunters get record haul in Cotswolds

More than 1,000 scientifically significant specimens taken from former quarry after discovery

When Sally and Neville Hollingworth started going stir crazy in lockdown, rather than baking bread or doing quizzes on Zoom, the amateur palaeontologists turned to Google Earth.

The couple passed the time planning for their next trip - using the satellite images to inspect sites that had previously yielded fossils - when they stumbled across a quarry in the Cotswolds. From the exposure of the geology Neville, who has a PhD in geology, could tell the site was promising, but he was not expecting it to yield one of the best fossil finds in the UK in decades.