The Beast of Fishbourne

Take a look at this rather beautiful thing. It's about 3x2 cms and looks like polished metal.
My youngest son found it when we went beach-combing down along the shoreline at the end of Fishbourne Lane. We were looking for good skimming stones (there are loads of nice flat flints and slates there) and whatever else we could find when Jerry picked this up. At first I thought it was a bit of seaweed holdfast or a lump of old Sugarkelp until I held it and realised that it was stone. I stopped Jerry from hurling it into the Solent by giving a much nicer pebble and carefully pocketed the whatever-it-was. And, having scanned it in and sent a picture to expert palaeontologist Martin Munt at Dinosaur Isle, I 've been waiting keenly to learn what it might actually be. Well, it wasn't disappointing that's for sure! It is a 'scute', that's a piece of body armour, from a 35 million year-old crocodile called Diplocynodon!
How completely fantastic.