A six-year-old boy has found a fossil dating back nearly five hundred million years in his garden after receiving a fossil-hunting kit for Christmas.
Siddak Singh Jhamat is believed to be very "excited" to have found the fossil in his Walsall garden after digging for worms. His father was able to identify the horn coral through a fossil group he is a member of on Facebook. And Vish Singh estimates that the fossil is between 251 and 488 million years old. He believes that the fossil's markings mean it is most likely a Rugosa coral, estimated to be between 251 to 488 million years old.
In a statement to the BBC, Siddak said, "I was just digging for worms and things like pottery and bricks and I just came across this rock which looked a bit like a horn, and thought it could be a tooth or a claw or a horn, but it was actually a piece of coral which is called horn coral. I was really excited about what it really was."
Mr Singh further added, "We were surprised he found something so odd-shaped in the soil... he found a horn coral, and some smaller pieces next to it, then the next day he went digging again and found a congealed block of sand. In that there were loads of little molluscs and sea shells, and something called a crinoid, which is like a tentacle of a squid, so it's quite a prehistoric thing.
“The period that they existed from was between 500 and 251 million years ago, the Paleozoic Era. England at the time was part of Pangea, a landmass of continents. England was all underwater as well... that's quite significant expanse of time."
