Melby Fish Beds

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The Melby Fish Beds is the collective name given to two thick bands of pale grey sandy siltsone and shale which have yielded fish fossils and abundant plant fossils at Melby, Sandness, in the Old Red Sandstone to the west of the Melby Fault. These beds are exposed in the cliffs near Huxter, though access is difficult.

D.M.S Watson, in his 1934 Report on Fossil Fish from Sandness, Shetland, compared the fish fossils found here with other Middle Red Old Sandstone fish faunas from Orkney, Caithness and others parts of Scotland. His conclusion was that one of the Melby genera, Pterichthyodes, occurs elsewhere only at the Achanarras horizon of Caithness and in the Stromness beds of Orkney, thus suggesting that the Melby Fish Beds might be equated with those, and presumed to be of basal Givetian age.

SEE: The Geology of Western Shetland, Mykura and Phemister, HMSO Edinburgh, 1976, Ch.10