Sheppey Cliffs and Foreshore is a biological and geological Site of Special Scientific Interest which stretches between Minster and

Leysdown-on-Sea Leysdown-on-Sea is a village on the east coast of the Isle of Sheppey in the borough of Swale in Kent, England. In 2020 it had an estimated population of 936. The civil parish is Leysdown and includes the settlements of Bay View, Shellness an ...

Kent Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west, and Essex to the north across the estuary of the River Thames; it faces ...

, England. It includes five

Geological Conservation Review The Geological Conservation Review (GCR) is produced by the UK's Joint Nature Conservation Committee and is designed to identify those sites of national and international importance needed to show all the key scientific elements of the geological ...

sites. This site exposes

Eocene The Eocene ( ) Epoch is a geological epoch that lasted from about 56 to 33.9 million years ago (mya). It is the second epoch of the Paleogene Period in the modern Cenozoic Era. The name ''Eocene'' comes from the Ancient Greek (''ēṓs'', " ...

London Clay The London Clay Formation is a marine geological formation of Ypresian (early Eocene Epoch, c. 56–49 million years ago) age which crops out in the southeast of England. The London Clay is well known for its fossil content. The fossils from t ...

with well-preserved fossil fauna and flora, which have been studied since the eighteenth century.

The SSSI

London clay was deposited in a shallow sea forming beds up to deep at the eastern end. Up to five cycles of deposition, each followed by shallowing of the sea, have been found. Each cycle begins with coarser material being laid down, and this was followed by clay which became increasingly sandy. These layers have been labelled A to E (with A being the oldest), and at Sheppey, the layers C to E are exposed on the cliffs and foreshore. Each layer has its own flora and fauna, with well-preserved fossils of invertebrates including bivalve and gastropod

molluscs Mollusca is the second-largest phylum of invertebrate animals after the Arthropoda, the members of which are known as molluscs or mollusks (). Around 85,000 extant species of molluscs are recognized. The number of fossil species is estim ...

brachiopod Brachiopods (), phylum Brachiopoda, are a phylum of trochozoan animals that have hard "valves" (shells) on the upper and lower surfaces, unlike the left and right arrangement in bivalve molluscs. Brachiopod valves are hinged at the rear end, w ...

s and

nautiloid Nautiloids are a group of marine cephalopods (Mollusca) which originated in the Late Cambrian and are represented today by the living ''Nautilus'' and '' Allonautilus''. Fossil nautiloids are diverse and speciose, with over 2,500 recorded specie ...

s, as well as articulated lobsters and crabs, and sometimes insects. There is also a range of fossils of sharks, rays and bony fish, reptiles and birds. Some of the bones occur in nodules in the clay, and much material has been washed out onto the beach. Turtles, crocodiles and snakes are represented among the reptiles, and the birds include members of sixteen families. Sheppey cliffs are also a rich

palaeobotany Paleobotany, which is also spelled as palaeobotany, is the branch of botany dealing with the recovery and identification of plant remains from geological contexts, and their use for the biological reconstruction of past environments (paleogeogr ...

site. Many fossils of Eocene plants have been found, mostly from layers D and E, and over 300 species have been recorded. Dominant among them are tropical lianas; the habitat seems to have been a lush forest bordering a warm, shallow sea.

Ecology

The site is botanically important for the dragon's teeth (''Tetragonolobus maritimus'') which is found in only a few locations in Britain, and several other uncommon plants occur here, one being bithynian vetch (''Vicia bithynica'').

References

{{SSSIs Kent Sites of Special Scientific Interest in Kent Geological Conservation Review sites Kent coast