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

IT’S one of Liverpool’s newest, swankiest shopping centres. But next to the polished floors and up-to-the-minute styles inside the Metquarter is a mine of altogether older treasures.

We make a curious sight hunkered down on the steps, armed with water spray and closely examining a section of walls next to a stainless steel banister.

But three inches across, its perfect swirls etched with pristine clarity onto pearly white limestone, this ammonite is the highlight of our tour of the fossils sprinkled across the buildings of Liverpool. It’s from the late Jurassic period – about 150m years ago – and floated down into the fine mud sediment of a sub-tropical lagoon in Bavaria. Some, remarks geologist Tony Morgan, from the city’s World Museum, were more than a metre high.

He and Liverpool Geological Society colleagues are running a fossil and rock tour of the city centre for National Science Week.

They show us that you don’t have to go to a museum to find prehistoric wonders – they’re literally embedded in the city’s fabric.

Here, next to the ammonite, is the dark-bullet shaped mark of a belemnite, which would have had squid-like tentacles emerging from it.

Suddenly we’re spotting fossils all over the walls.

Liverpool’s a hot-spot for fossil-spotters because of the liberal use of Portland limestone by town planners 150 years ago. It was formed 150m years ago, and excavated in Dorset. “A lot of Liverpool’s grand buildings, built during the last century, were made from Portland stone, from Cornwall, because it was such a lovely white colour, weight-bearing and easy to work with.

* VIEW a Google Map of fossils in Liverpool city centre here

“Buildings like the Victoria Monument, the Blackburn Assurance building at the bottom of Dale Street and the tunnel ventilation towers on North John Street, the NorthWestern Halls on Lime Street and, I think Lewis’s, all have a lot of different species in them.

“Sometimes you have to get behind them to check them out properly.”