Smokejack Clay Pit is a geological Site of Special Scientific Interest east of

Cranleigh Cranleigh is a village and civil parish, about southeast of Guildford in Surrey, England. It lies on a minor road east of the A281, which links Guildford with Horsham. It is in the north-west corner of the Weald, a large remnant forest, the m ...

in Surrey. It is a

Geological Conservation Review The Geological Conservation Review (GCR) is produced by the UK's Joint Nature Conservation Committee and is designed to identify those sites of national and international importance needed to show all the key scientific elements of the geological ...

site. This site exposes

Lower Cretaceous Lower may refer to: *Lower (surname) *Lower Township, New Jersey *Lower Receiver (firearms) *Lower Wick Gloucestershire, England See also *Nizhny Nizhny (russian: Ни́жний; masculine), Nizhnyaya (; feminine), or Nizhneye (russian: Ни́� ...

rocks of the

Weald Clay Group Weald Clay or the Weald Clay Formation is a Lower Cretaceous sedimentary rock unit underlying areas of South East England, between the North and South Downs, in an area called the Weald Basin. It is the uppermost unit of the Wealden Group of ro ...

. Fossils of six orders of insects have been recorded and an unusual level of details has been preserved. It is the best Weald Clay reptile site, with crocodile teeth,

coprolite A coprolite (also known as a coprolith) is fossilized feces. Coprolites are classified as trace fossils as opposed to body fossils, as they give evidence for the animal's behaviour (in this case, diet) rather than morphology. The name is de ...

s and part of an ''

Iguanodon ''Iguanodon'' ( ; meaning 'iguana-tooth'), named in 1825, is a genus of iguanodontian dinosaur. While many species have been classified in the genus ''Iguanodon'', dating from the late Jurassic Period to the early Cretaceous Period of Asia, ...

''. The

holotype specimen A holotype is a single physical example (or illustration) of an organism, known to have been used when the species (or lower-ranked taxon) was formally described. It is either the single such physical example (or illustration) or one of several ...

of the fish eating

theropod Theropoda (; ), whose members are known as theropods, is a dinosaur clade that is characterized by hollow bones and three toes and claws on each limb. Theropods are generally classed as a group of saurischian dinosaurs. They were ancestrally ...

dinosaur, '' Baryonyx walkeri'' was discovered on the site.

References

{{SSSIs Surrey Sites of Special Scientific Interest in Surrey Geological Conservation Review sites Geology of South-East England