[X] My Assistant

[ustrax]

Here at home, I usually take a walk with my dog to a nearby field.
In this particular site, some kms far from the sea, the ground is littered with fossils of small shelled creatures.
They are scattered all over at the surface, let's say that if you pick ten rocks, one of them has something.
There are also fragments embeded in larger basaltic blocks.
We are in the Sintra Hills (they are the green area here and here, the green arrow marks the field I am talking about) region which were formed in a process that spawned from 80my to 30my due to magmatic intrusion, it is known that this lifted what was once the ground forming cliff where we can now see dinosaur footprints.
The question is, that piece of ground will soon be predated by house building.
What I would like to know is:
#01 - What might have happened there in the past?
Did that area was part of the ocean that retreated when hills raised?
Did it suffered some king of tsunami event that brought all the creatures to dry land?

#03 – Can someone tell me, from the images (they're not good I know, I'll try to take some more) what kind of creatures are we looking at? There is one species appearing more often, some kind of creature with spiral mother-of-pearl shell...

#02 - What could we expect to find digging under the surface?

#03 – Is it worthy to take measures to delay the beggining of constructions or is this just an ordinary situation?

Thanks!

[DFinfrock]

Ustrax,

I would suggest that you conduct a fossil search the day after a heavy rain. My wife is on the board of a group starting a new historical museum in our community. This past month, they were called out to investigate the skeleton of a mosasaur that appeared in a limestone streambed just a few miles outside of Dallas, after a heavy rainstorm washed away overlying sediments.

David