Go to the fallen tree towards the beachhead along Sentosa’s Coastal Trail at low tide and feel the different rocks — clay-coloured rocks are mudstones, and black-coloured rocks are granite.
Significance:
As humans, we have an instinctive sense of time and history—as if time itself was a living thing. We are constantly exposed to the passage of time through our daily activities and interactions. But Earth is dynamic in timescales that are much longer than human lives. From mountains, to underwater trenches, to even the rock formations on Sentosa, these geophysical spaces record our planet’s surface history, even preserving events from millions of years ago through fossilisation.
The Tanjong Rimau Formation and the Fort Siloso Formation are two rock formations in Sentosa that comprise black, brown, and red/orange rusty sandstones. This constitutes the basement rock of Singapore, which was formed in the early Triassic period.
A Field Guide To the Geology of Singapore (Oliver & Gupta, 2017) documents an account of a possible dinosaur footprint found during a field expedition. The research paper created a point of departure for visualising Singapore during the prehistoric era.