Belemnites (Ocean View Dunedin)

This site is located on private property.

Travelling south from Dunedin on the Brighton Rd, and just at the start of the township to the right turn into Creamery Road. On the right hand side you can see some minor slumping and erosion.

This material is known as Brighton Limestone.

This material is yellow-orange in colour and contains small belemnites (Dimitobelid) of around 1cm in length are of the Kaitangatan and Wangaloan era. (early Paleocene 65-55mya)

This limestones overlays measures of coal that was onced mined in the area.

Belemnites (or belemnoids) are an extinct group of marine cephalopod, very similar in many ways to the modern squid and closely related to the modern cuttlefish. Like them, the belemnites possessed an ink sac, but, unlike the squid, they possessed ten arms of roughly equal length and no tentacles.

Belemnites were numerous during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, and their fossils are abundant in Mesozoic marine rocks, often accompanying their cousins the ammonites. The belemnites become extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period along with the ammonites