Susan Hoi (Fossil Shell Beach) The shell graveyard at Ban Laem Pho was once a large freshwater swamp, home to a kind of snail. Over eons dating from the Tertiary Age, about 40 million years ago, these snails lived and died by the million, to the extent that the dead snails formed a layer upon which existed the living. Eventually, weather changes precipitated the swamp's disappearance, but by then the layer of fossilized snail shells was forty centimeters thick, resting on ten centimeters of lignite below which is the subsoil. Because of geographic upheaval, this Shelly limestone is now distributed in great broken sheets of impressive magnitude on the seashore at Laem Pho. |