The biggest UK railway construction site since the nineteenth century has exposed a near‐complete time slice through the entire Jurassic succession of central England. This is yielding a wealth of stratigraphical, palaeobiological and palaeoenvironmental data that is otherwise generally poorly exposed at the present day. Construction of the HS2 (High Speed 2) railway scheme is generating important exposures of these strata, affording significant geological recording, research and educational opportunities.

The Lower Jurassic Down Cliff Sand Member of the Dorset coast, southern England, is a rich source of marine invertebrate fossils. Among these are echinoderms and less common arthropods. Despite having multi‐component skeletons that are prone to disarticulation, remains of some of these are remarkably complete. This article examines the circumstances that could have led to their death, burial and intact preservation.

Ammonites were molluscs, now extinct, that abounded in Mesozoic seas. Their external shells are almost always the only parts of them that are preserved, and their soft‐part anatomy and lifestyles remain largely unknown. The shells, however, can be preserved in various ways that shed light on the animals as living organisms, including their variation and evolution, possible colour patterning and the creatures that preyed upon them.

The city of Oxford, in south‐central England, is partly surrounded by hills on which coral‐rich limestones crop out. The coral developments constitute small reefs and formed during a widely documented Late Jurassic (mid‐Oxfordian) warming episode, near the northern limit of reef growth at that time. Given its ready availability, the coral rock and associated detrital limestone were dug as building stone for 900 years or more and used extensively within Oxford until the beginning of the twentieth century. William Joscelyn Arkell (1904–1958) was a leading twentieth century expert on Jurassic geology and had wide‐ranging interests in these strata. In particular, his observations on Oxfordian reef palaeoecology, climatic significance and structural context have provided the foundations of our modern understanding of these fascinating rocks, which are poorly exposed at the present day.

Can a beachcomber be a geologist in the absence of in situ rock exposures? I say yes, particularly for those of us with a fondness for Aktuo Paläontologie, the interpretation of modern shell remains as if they are fossils. Modern dead shells can provide a wealth of thought‐provoking information, confirming that the present is, indeed, the key to the past.

Long‐term preservation of landforms produces a geological record that can be used to unravel past Earth surface processes in space and time. Identification and analysis of landforms has been revolutionized by the availability of high‐resolution (metre‐scale) topographic survey data covering extensive areas, using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR). Airborne LiDAR has been in widespread use for over two decades; but due to increasing availability of data, some regions are only just beginning to be ‘explored’ in this way. In this article, we showcase high‐resolution topography derived from airborne LiDAR survey data across South Island, New Zealand. We evidence a variety of tectonic, glacial, fluvial, hillslope and other landforms hitherto undetected within mountainous areas and beneath forests. We discuss how the characteristics of shape, size, position and association can differentiate landforms from one another, and how combinations of landforms enable landsystems to be identified that are diagnostic of past environmental conditions.