The second revised edition of the photobook “The Trace Fossils of Gemstone Beach” includes two pages of photos of stones that I have collected from Ward Beach in Southern Marlborough. Ward Beach is about six kilometres off the main road between Blenheim and Kaikoura, east of the small village of Ward. The setting is spectacular – you drive through high hills with steep slopes. The coastline, uplifted in the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake, has many interesting rock formations, including the Ward Beach boulders. It is a limestone area, and quite a few of the stones here consist of that rock type, with many containing the trace fossils that I find so interesting. I have learned a lot about stone identification from published and online sources, other rockhounds, members of Rock and Mineral Clubs, Facebook Rockhound Groups, and specimens viewed in museums and private collections. However, my ability to identify stones is limited – I am still in the process of learning – so these Posts are reports on my understanding at this time.
Page 24 is the first of the two pages with stones from Ward Beach – note that the stone numbers don’t appear in the book:
#1 – This is the most unusual stone I have found on Ward Beach, collected in October 2024. I was fascinated by what appeared to be lots and lots of tiny elongated crystals (see close-ups below). A month after I found it, John Taylor, a rockhound and fossil enthusiast who lives in Scotland, visited me and I showed it to him. He looked closely at it under a magnifying glass and with a blacklight torch. The latter revealed some calcite present, and John thought the stone was most likely a shell fossil, probably of an oyster of some kind. The long thin features that had caught my eye are part of the shell material remaining after some erosion.
#2 – I think this is a colourful limestone pebble. I have seen similar stones here on Ward Beach as well as further south near Kaikoura, though they are not common. I found this one in July 2025, though the photo in the Post for that day shows the other side of the stone. For examples of some other shades of Ward Beach limestone, see this Post.
#3 – A dark stone with intense red threads and patches of probably iron oxide, found in March 2024.
#4 – There are many limestone pebbles with trace fossils in them here. This is one, found in March 2026. The traces are larger than many, and well-defined. For other examples, see this Post.
#5 – I have found four of these stones on Ward Beach. When picked up on the beach, they look like they have lots of tiny sparkling spots in them. I wonder if they are very small square crystals of some kind, but haven’t been able to identify them. I found this specimen in July 2026.
#6 – This stone, collected in September 2024, looks like a breccia with some very tiny veins and patches of chalcedony (agate) in it (see close-up photo below, after Stone #9).
#7 – This one is unique so far in my fossicking career. It could be a breccia, a stone made up of rock fragments in a fine-grained matrix. Or it could consist of pieces of shell, or fossilised shell. Found on Ward Beach in July 2025.
#8 – Found the same day as Stone #7, this could be limestone with dendrites. Dendrites are thin branching lines of crystals, often of some variety of manganese oxide, that grow over a surface in a rock or mineral. They can often look like the veins of a leaf. For other examples from Ward Beach, see the second part of this Post.
#9 – This stone looks like a jasper but it has some light grey material in it that appears not to be quartz (see close-up, below right) – it is likely to be chalcedony (agate), making it a “jaspagate”. I found it in October 2024 during the same fossick that I found Stone #1.
#10 – A heavily veined creamy-coloured limestone, I found this in September 2024. The small brown patches in it could be flint. For other examples from Ward Beach, see this Post.
#11 – An unknown stone, found in April 2026. It’s quite small but had an interesting mix of colours and shapes.
The next Post in this Series looks at the stones on Page 25, also collected from Ward Beach (not yet available).
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