Man shocked when 'huge rock' on UK beach turns out to be something else

Whilst we adore British beaches, occasionally all manner of unexpected treasures can wash ashore. Throughout the years, seaside visitors have discovered an array of bizarre and marvellous objects along our coastline, and one man was absolutely stunned by his recent coastal find.

Liam, who goes by forgottenfossils on TikTok, claimed the sea "tried to keep a secret", but he managed to reveal something rather spectacular at a beach in Whitby, England. He recorded the discovery in a recent video, and was shocked to his core when he realised it wasn't actually the "enormous rock" he'd originally believed it to be.

The social media enthusiast spends considerable time exploring his local shoreline, and he's made some incredible discoveries. Not to mention, plenty of people sing the praises of Whitby's beach quality as well.

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In footage posted online, Liam penned: "I thought this was just another rock. Turns out it's a time capsule from the Jurassic period.

"It must have been in the beach system for years. Two well-preserved Ammonites hidden within."

The clip has racked up hundreds of views since being posted, with viewers clearly amazed by the remarkable find.

If you're unfamiliar with Ammonoids, they are extinct (typically) spiral-shelled cephalopods that makeup the subclass Ammonoidea. They are typically more closely connected to modern octopuses, squid and cuttlefish (which makeup the clade Coleoidea) than they are to nautiluses (family Nautilidae).

It's believed they first emerged during the Emsian stage of the Early Devonian (410.62 million years ago), and the final species vanished during or shortly after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event (66 million years ago).

More often than not, they are called ammonites, which is the term commonly used to describe members of the order Ammonitida. This is the only surviving group of ammonoids known from the Jurassic up until their extinction.

Throughout their history, Ammonoids have been remarkably diverse, with over 10,000 species having been documented. They are regarded as superb index fossils.

Typically, the fossil shells take the shape of planispirals, but some helically spiralled and non-spiralled forms (known as heteromorphs) have also been discovered in the past, mainly during the Cretaceous period.

According to the Natural History Museum, Ammonites were shelled cephalopods that died out about 66 million years ago. Fossils of them can be found all around the world, sometimes in "very large concentrations".

"Ammonites are extinct shelled cephalopods. All of them had a chambered shell that they used for buoyancy," explained Zoë Hughes, the museum's Curator of Fossil Invertebrates. Cephalopods, members of the Cephalopoda group, are divided into three subgroups: coleoids, which include squids, octopuses and cuttlefishes, nautiloids and ammonites.

Zoë added: "Some of their morphology was closer to that of the coleoid group. We think it's more likely that ammonites would have had eight arms rather than lots of tentacles like a nautilus, though the shell is more similar to that of a nautilus.

"The ammonite would have lived in one chamber, but we don't know how often they built a new one. Previously it's been suggested this could have been a monthly occurrence, but there's no evidence for that.

"Some studies looking at the chemical composition of the shells - a field called sclerochronology - are starting to gain some insight of how long ammonites might have lived."