Beaminster Museum - Horn Park NNR

 

Conservation, Horn Park 2011 (Alan Holiday)

Horn Park National Nature Reserve (NNR) is a couple of miles west of Beaminster in west Dorset. It is the smallest NNR in the country (0.32ha) but distinguished by being a world-famous site for its Jurassic ammonite fossils. It provides the most complete record of Mid-Jurassic ammonites in the country. With financial help from the Geologists' Association Curry Fund this site now its own dedicated display in Beaminster's volunteer-run museum. The site, an old quarry, is very poorly known and is remote from the town and without public access. Also, with no interpretive materials available, the complex science and geology of the quarry could not be readily understood or made available. Alan Holiday and Bob Chandler have donated ammonites for the display.

 Inferior Oolite, Horn Park, now in Museum (Alan Holiday)

Beaminster is about 10km north of the Jurassic Coast World Heritage site. The Beaminster museum collection is a useful addition to the Jurassic Coast displays in Lyme Regis and Honiton museums.
The exhibition's centrepiece is a representation of the stratigraphic profile of Horn Park's Inferior Oolite deposits of the Bathonian, Bajocian and Aalenian Stages. Ammonites are displayed in their correct relative positions (depths) in the profile. There is much more, including fossils that can be handled by visitors.