Further to A New Giant Cockle Discovery, we have been updated on the whole story by Ray Engels who had unearthed the specimen during excavation work at Birkenhead. Ray has explained just how exactly he found the ‘giant cockle’ on a house block at Birkenhead.
It could easily have been discarded by Ray, but he could see that it was somehow very important. Ray showed his cockle find to the SA Maritime Museum staff in Port Adelaide. Staff at the SAMM referred the matter to staff at the SA Museum. The staff at the SAM were apparently quite excited by Ray’s find.
As Ray initially told us, “I’ve recently donated the cockle to the SA Museum mollusc department and they’re currently studying it for its future display in the museum, it ended up measuring very close to 120mm wide and about 10mm thick it may also be a new species I’m told.”
Ray had a T-shirt made up proclaiming his new-found fame of having found the biggest cockle in SA. The shirt was a boasting thing for his group of friends; I told Ray to ‘milk it for all that he could’.
But Ray’s 15-minutes of fame didn’t en d with the T-shirt. Triple M radio’s Roo, Ditts & Loz held a competition for people who had collected or acquired any kind of historical item. The whole competition can be heard at https://open.spotify.com/episode/5tcWQY9qOMZ2VL7vtZHEMD?si=3NSdQD8iRnq1bPLKJ0Mn1A . Ray’s part features at the 20.42 min-mark of the recording.
Needless to say, Ray won the competition against some stiff opposition. His prize was some tickets to see Bernard Fanning , the lead singer of Powderfinger.
The amazing thing about Ray’s cockle find is that he found it something like 500m away from the Birkenhead Bridge or the nearest part of the Port River. It is fair to say, however, that the river was surrounded by tidal flats pre-European settlement .
Ray says that the (dead, almost fossilised) cockle had flipped out of the ground whilst he was doing a shallow excavation of 100-150mm on the building site. He says that the ground that the cockle had flipped out of was dryish sand.
Ray’s cockle is now being investigated by Mary-Anne Binnie, the Palaeontology Collections Manager at the SAM. Early indications are that the cockle could possibly be more than 200 years old, and possibly a new species.
We look forward to the conclusion of the SAM’s investigations.
Has there ever been a nautilus egg case found on Largs Bay?
Or what could be a special shell originating in Africa , sometimes found there?
From a curious visitor….
We asked Copilot the question “Has there ever been a nautilus egg case found on Largs Bay beach in south australia”. We got a long response from that. Give it a try yourself. We will keep trying to find out more for you. Do you have a photo of an object found there?