The cliffs at Fairlight are of sandstone and Wealden Clay
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Fossil Plants

Hastings Museum is particularly rich in plant fossils. Some of them are type specimens. This means that one particular fossil has been selected to show the main character of the whole species.

Some of the plants of the dinosaur period are still with us in reduced form. Club mosses and liverworts grew as large as bushes and reproduced by releasing spores. Equisetes or horsetails also grew up to 10 metres high, anchored by a network of horizontal roots as their modern descendants do today. These horsetail trees are known as Calamites. The club mosses and horsetails together formed dense impenetrable thickets.

Fossil leaf of Otozamites Klipsteinii
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Some of the plants of the dinosaur period are still with us in reduced form. Club mosses and liverworts grew as large as bushes and reproduced by releasing spores. Equisetes or horsetails also grew up to 10 metres high, anchored by a network of horizontal roots as their modern descendants do today. These horsetail trees are known as Calamites. The club mosses and horsetails together formed dense impenetrable thickets.

Fossil leaf of Zamites Bucchianus
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Other plants of the Cretaceous period include conifers, ferns and cycads. Ferns appeared around the same time as horsetails about 370 million years ago. Again, these grew much taller than today. Tempskya, which is often found in the Hastings area, grew up to 18 metres high. Its trunk was made up of lots of narrow roots and stems with leaves growing at the top. It too reproduced by spores.

Cycads still grow today in small numbers in some tropical and sub-tropical regions. Their ancestors, plants such as Williamsonia and Zamites, evolved originally from ferns. It was not until the end of the Cretaceous period that flowering plants pollinated by insects became firmly established.