You don’t need to go digging about on the coast to see fossils. Emma Pinch learns where to find them in the city centre

Crinoids also feature on the knobbly bollards linked by a chain round the Steble Fountains, in front of the Walker Art Gallery.

They appear to be drab concrete, possibly used for target practice by the wheeling gulls overhead.

In fact the rock in the bollards dates back 340m years, formed in the shallow tropical sea in North Wales, surrounded by reefs.

Tony points out brachiopods, the white deposits which turn out not to be courtesy of the seagulls at all. They’re related to clams.

The delicate wave-like patterns, in the shape of small fans, are solitary horn corals.

The lines marking the “nobbles” are worm burrows. Now we know what we’re looking at, it’s fascinating.

“These were all the animals that lived in the mud to feed,” says Tony.

On several of the pale paving slabs outside the World Museum, Tony points out two-inch wide lines going across the paving stones. They look like grooves cut by channels of water draining over them, and you’d walk over them every day thinking nothing of it.

They’re striated in the direction of the groove and are 320m-year-old fossil tree roots, from coal forests, called stigmaria.

“They’re branching tap roots which went down into the mud and had little roots off them,” says Tony.

“You sometimes need to have a look behind a statue or building to find them, but there’s plenty of fossil life to see in Liverpool city centre if you look for it.”

It’s good to know that, amid all the constant renewal in Liverpool, the past is all around us.

* JOE CROSSLEY, of the Liverpool Geological Society, is staging a Family Fossil Hunt on March 8. For details, phone 0151 426 1324 or email him on lgscrossley@hotmail.com