One fun thing about examining the Port Askaig Tillite in the field is to find odd-shaped exemplars of the unit lying on Islay’s beaches. My favorites were shaped like wands, or antennae, or perhaps the drumsticks freshly detached from a Thanksgiving turkey… a big clast at one end and then a thin septum of the finer-grained matrix to hang on to:
Here’s an example:
The shape results from differential weathering of the matrix relative to the large clast. Another example is perhaps even more striking, with an ice-cream-cone morphology:
I recently learned of a museum in Japan dedicated to rocks that look like faces. Perhaps some Ileach should found a museum dedicated to “drumstick stones”…