What to look for when fossil hunting

Beach shingle is random. Fossils are not. Anything that repeats — ribs at regular intervals, segments, a spiral, a five-pointed star, parallel grain — is worth picking up.

This is the single most useful habit to build. You are not searching for fossils so much as for pattern.

• A flat spiral with ribs: an ammonite
• A smooth tapering bullet with a crystalline broken end: a belemnite
• A glossy dark triangle with a matt root: a shark tooth
• A dome or heart with a five-petal pattern: a sea urchin
• A disc with a hole or star at its centre: a crinoid stem segment

Between them these cover most of what a British beach will give up, and each is unmistakable once you have held one.

Pick things up. Bone and mineralised material are noticeably heavy for their size, and bone shows a spongy honeycomb texture on any broken surface. Jet does the opposite — it is startlingly light and slightly warm to the touch.

Wet the surface, or search just after the tide has gone out. Wet rock shows detail that dry rock hides completely.

Work the strandline and the bands of finer shingle rather than open sand. Heavy, small objects — teeth, belemnite tips, nodules — sort themselves into these bands. On a clay foreshore, look in the runnels where water has washed the surface clean.

Cover a small area properly rather than a long beach quickly. The difference in results is dramatic.