A PIECE of Jurassic history will grace the brand new extension at Shipston High School when work is completed and it won't have travelled far.

Contractors excavating at the school where a state-of-the-art teaching block is being built, ground to a halt recently when one of the machines unearthed a strange object.

The round object was about the size of a car wheel and appeared to be made of stone.

Initially the finders thought it was a piece of Roman masonry owing to the school's proximity to the Fosse Way, but closer examination releaved a large fossil.

Digging in the area immediately ceased and the school at once made contact with Mike Ashley and Dick Burge from the Shipston Museum as well as Warwickshire County Council and the County Museum at Warwick.

From photographs, Jon Radley, the Curator of Natural Sciences, identified the fossil as a giant ammonite with the scientific name, Arietites. Ammonites are extinct marine creatures very distantly related to squid and octopus. They calculated the fossil to be at least 190 million years old and to date back to the early part of the Jurassic period when the whole of Shipston and the Stour Valley would have been the sea.

The local hard clay in which the fossil was found would originally have been the Jurassic sea floor mud.

The technology department has preserved the remains for posterity and they are now proudly on display in the entrance to the school with plans for them to eventually be housed in the new teaching block only metres away from where the fossil was found.

Following a further careful search of the site, building work was able to re-start with no major delay to the project. This week the steel work for the frame of the building arrived on site which, when assembled, will start to give onlookers a good idea of the size and shape of the new building.

Headteacher, Jonathan Baker, said: "We are all rather overwhelmed by the age of the discovery. We are really grateful to our contractors, Trendgrey, and their site manager Kevin Wynne for the care they took in protecting the discovery and I’m delighted that Chris Booker and other members of our technology department have taken on the task of preserving and presenting the remains so enthusiastically."

In the meantime the school says it is hoping for a large hoard of Roman gold to be unearthed next which would help to pay for the future phases of the school’s redevelopment.