Also in my garage: modern classic cars and ancient fossils

By Charlie Calderwood

| 23 Mar 2023

Classic & Sports Car – Also in my garage: modern classics and ancient fossils

“I’m into old, dead stuff – and not just the cars, there are the rocks, too,” jokes John-Joe Vollans.

‘JJ’ has been owning and tinkering with older cars since he could drive, starting out with a string of Volkswagen Golf Mk2s and continuing to his present barn-full containing a Mercedes-Benz 190E Sportline and a 124-series estate, a Lotus Esprit and an E39 BMW 535i.

As someone who writes and makes videos about vehicles for a living (find Curveaddict on YouTube), JJ is always around classics.

JJ’s T-Rex skull (right) is a plastic recreation

“Old cars are fabulous most of the time,” he says, “but they can be a pain, we all know it. Sometimes I need to do something completely different, and this is brilliant for that.”

JJ’s narrow home garage is currently occupied by his Opel Manta A, long awaiting restoration, so it’s a self-built log cabin in the back garden that holds his other passion: fossils.

“Watching Jurassic Park aged seven was an epochal moment,” explains JJ. “When I was 17 I chose to study A-level geology for the same reason.

“Years later, when I started my own content business and had a more flexible schedule, I was keen to pick up an old hobby, and that was fossils. I’ve never grown out of it.”

An air scribe sits inside a dust extractor, and a mask is also worn to help prevent miner’s lung

As soon as loosening Coronavirus restrictions allowed, JJ made a trip to his nearest fossil-hunting ground in Peterborough, where he duly found an ichthyosaur tail vertebra, still his only marine reptile bone so far.

“I got the bug from that and soon went down to Dorset, basically as a family holiday but with a slight ulterior motive – I disappeared in the evenings to go fossil-hunting on Charmouth beach. Most of my collection is Jurassic,” says JJ.

Dorset’s Jurassic coast is particularly good for ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, he tells us, but North Yorkshire has become his favourite hunting ground, where ammonites and other cephalopods are far more common.

“What keeps fossil hunters up at night is thinking about what was lost while man wasn’t looking…”

“If you’re lucky, you’ll find what we call ‘cannonballs’ in North Yorkshire,” he says, picking up a round, rust-stained rock.

“They erode out of the shale cliffs. You’re not allowed to hammer the cliffs or the bedrock, but anything that comes out naturally and is on the beach is fair game.

“It’s going to be destroyed by the sea if someone doesn’t pick it up. They will have been buried for 200 million years, yet left on the beach for just a few weeks, they’re gone.

“What keeps fossil hunters up at night is thinking about what was lost while man wasn’t looking, for millions of years, but also what might still be in the cliffs. That’s what keeps us coming back.”

Fossil-hunting is a fairly accessible hobby and there are plenty of great spots for it throughout the UK

These ‘cannonballs’ nearly always contain an ammonite or two. The rocks are split on the beach to check that there is something inside, then they are stuck back together.

Later, JJ gets to work with his pneumatic scribe, removing the rock to expose the fossil. A typical large ‘nodule’ will take 20-30 hours to prepare.

It’s only the air scribe, its compressor and a dust extractor that give any real cost to the hobby, reckons JJ, and indeed some fossils can be found without further work being needed.

“There are virtually no barriers to entry,” he says. “You just need to go to the right beach and check permission for collecting.

“The fossil community is great and very welcoming. Here in the UK we are very well placed for it too; we have an incredible variety of geological periods, which lots of places don’t have.

“Some of the oldest rocks on earth are found in western Scotland, and in other areas you can find deposits ranging right up to the ice age, which was ‘only’ 10-30,000 years ago.”

Images: Max Edleston

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