It is thought that these will have contained examples of the ammonite fossils for which the Reserve is world famous. Commenting on the damage, Environment Minister Mark H Durkan said: ” I am extremely annoyed at the thoughtlessness of the person or people who have damaged the Nature Reserve at Portrush.
Their selfishness has spoiled the experience of other visitors to this important site, some of whom come from overseas specially to visit it. I expect members of the public to respect this Reserve and other aspects of our natural heritage and hope that anyone with information on this theft will contact the PSNI or Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA).
“Because of its historical importance Portrush National Nature Reserve has become a place of ‘pilgrimage’ for geologists and an important educational site for geology students. The damage caused by the thieves will mean that visitors to the Reserve will be hard-pressed to locate the fossils which made it famous. The professional geological community will be outraged at what has happened here.
“The reasons behind the theft are unclear but the rock samples may have been taken for research purposes, for commercial sale or for a private collection. PSNI will be asked to investigate. The fossils themselves tend to be of poor quality and are of little commercial value. Their importance lies in the false impression that they gave of fossils in igneous rock.”
The site, which is also an Area of Special Scientific Interest, is world-renowned for its role 200 years ago in understanding how certain types of rocks were formed when there were two main camps in an academic battle. The ‘Neptunists’ thought that rocks which we now refer to as ‘igneous’, were actually formed in an ancient ocean.
The ‘Vulcanists’ saw evidence from a range of sites, including the Giants Causeway, that such rocks originated as molten magma or lava cooling to produce basalts and granites.
As evidence from around Europe especially supported the Vulcanist view (a position that modern geologists support), the Neptunists identified the rocks at Portrush as definitive evidence supporting their view. Here were rocks which looked like basalt but containing fossil remains of past animal life, mainly ammonites, a now extinct group related to squids. How, they asked, could a formerly molten rock have supported life? Portrush looked for a while as if it could be the site that would result in ‘victory’ for the Neptunists and defeat for the modernising Vulcanists.
Some of the most important geologists of the day visited the Portrush site and proved that the fossil bearing rocks were not basalt at all but were, in fact, sedimentary rock of Jurassic age which had been altered by the later development of the Portrush Sill, a huge mass of igneous rock that Portrush is now built on. The heat and pressure from this molten rock baked the adjacent fossil rich rocks making them appear similar to basalt. The Vulcanists won the day, defeating what was effectively the Neptunists ‘last stand’.
Within the geological community, this debate was seen as the point at which modern geology dates from, where field evidence was used to refute conceptual approaches to geology. Some geologists even regard the rocks at Portrush as the single most important geological locality in the world.
