Teffont Evias Quarry and Lane Cutting is a 3.6 hectare geological Site of Special Scientific Interest at Teffont Evias in Wiltshire, England, notified in 1989. It consists of two parts, Teffont Evias Quarry (grid reference ST990310 ), and Teffont Evias Lane Cutting (grid reference ST994309 ). Forest trees are currently growing on both sites, but there are small accessible exposures on the sides of quarry and roadway cuttings.
The hectare is an SI accepted metric system unit of area equal to a square with 100-metre sides, or 10,000 m2, and is primarily used in the measurement of land. There are 100 hectares in one square kilometre. An acre is about 0.405 hectare and one hectare contains about 2.47 acres.
Teffont Evias, also Teffont Ewyas, past alternative spellings including Tevont Evias, is a small village and former civil parish in the south of Wiltshire, England. Edric Holmes described the village as "most delightfully situated", and Maurice Hewlett included Teffont in his list of the half dozen most beautiful villages in England. The present buildings are mostly of local stone, and several are thatched. With their immediate environs the older buildings are protected as a site of special building restraint.
Wiltshire is a county in South West England with an area of 3,485 km2. It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset, Somerset, Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire. The county town was originally Wilton, after which the county is named, but Wiltshire Council is now based in the county town of Trowbridge.
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The sites offer exposures of a mid-Purbeck Lagerstätte, fine-grained limestone rock with good conditions for fossilization. [1] These rocks and fossils were deposited after shallow seas receded about 146 million years ago. They record a warm environment of lakes and coastal lagoons, with occasional marine transgressions such as the Cinder Bed. Large fossils are rare, but they include insects of at least four Orders, fish, and crocodilians, also remains of vegetation, including a large tree [2] and Charales. [3] The charophytes, Clavator reidi, may have grown in a lake 1-2m deep or somewhat more. [4]
A Lagerstätte is a sedimentary deposit that exhibits extraordinary fossils with exceptional preservation—sometimes including preserved soft tissues. These formations may have resulted from carcass burial in an anoxic environment with minimal bacteria, thus delaying decomposition. Lagerstätten span geological time from the Neoproterozoic era to the present. Worldwide, some of the best examples of near-perfect fossilization are the Cambrian Maotianshan shales and Burgess Shale, the Devonian Hunsrück Slates and Gogo Formation, the Carboniferous Mazon Creek, the Jurassic Solnhofen limestone, the Cretaceous Santana and Yixian formations, and the Eocene Green River Formation.
Limestone is a sedimentary rock which is often composed of the skeletal fragments of marine organisms such as coral, foraminifera, and molluscs. Its major materials are the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of calcium carbonate (CaCO3).
A Mediterranean climate or dry summer climate is characterized by rainy winters and dry summers, with less than 40 mm of precipitation for at least three summer months. While the climate receives its name from the Mediterranean Basin, these are generally located on the western coasts of continents, between roughly 30 and 43 degrees north and south of the equator, typically between oceanic climates towards the poles, and semi-arid and arid climates towards the equator.
