The Fossil Hunters

Original passage written for Revision Library; fictional narrative, no source text reproduced.

The tide had only just turned when Nusrat and her younger brother, Tobias, picked their way across the shingle at Charmouth. Their father had promised that low tide after a storm was the best time to search for fossils, and the grey clouds still hanging over the cliffs were proof that the previous night's storm had been a fierce one.

'Keep your eyes on the ground, not on the waves,' said their father, Mr Ahmed, as he adjusted the strap of his canvas bag. 'The best finds are usually the ones nobody else has spotted yet.'

Tobias, who was only eight, found this instruction difficult to follow. Every few steps he glanced up at the towering grey cliffs, half expecting to see a dinosaur skeleton poking out of the rock. His sister, older and more patient, crouched low over the pebbles, turning each one with the tip of her trowel before discarding it.

They had been searching for almost an hour, and Tobias's enthusiasm had begun to fade, when Nusrat suddenly went very still.

'Dad,' she said quietly. 'Come and look at this.'

Half-buried in a grey nodule of rock was a perfect spiral, its ridged surface catching the weak morning light. It was an ammonite, coiled like a stone snail, and larger than anything the family had found before.

Mr Ahmed knelt beside his daughter and examined the fossil carefully, brushing away the loose sand with his thumb. 'That,' he said, 'is at least a hundred and ninety million years old. You should be very proud of yourself, Nusrat.'

Tobias, forgetting his tiredness at once, scrambled over to see. 'Can I hold it? Please?' Nusrat hesitated. She had found it, after all, and part of her wanted to keep it safely in her own hands a little longer. But she remembered how patiently Tobias had trudged along the beach beside her, never once complaining even when his wellington boots had filled with cold seawater.

'Go on then,' she said, placing the ammonite gently into his cupped palms. 'Just don't drop it.'

Tobias held the fossil as though it were made of glass, turning it slowly so the ridges caught the light. 'It's like holding time,' he murmured, and for once his sister did not tease him for saying something strange.

By the time the three of them climbed back up the path towards the car park, the clouds had begun to break apart, and thin bars of sunlight were spreading across the sea. Nusrat carried the ammonite wrapped carefully in a woollen scarf, already imagining the label she would write for it once they got home: Found at Charmouth, Dorset, by Nusrat Ahmed, aged eleven.