A TEAM from the University of Bradford says a recent trip to Kenya has proved that a trailblazing new technique of fossil hunting has the ability to revolutionise archaeology.

The Fossilfinder project began in September, and asked people to go online and study thousands of photographs taken of the Turkana Basin in Northern Kenya using super high definition cameras attached to a moving rig, all from the comfort of their own homes.

If they spotted anything of archaeological interest, they would then relay their findings to the Bradford-based team, which hopes to find find remains of early hominids in the area.

They would then use these tip offs to decide where to start looking when they next visited the site.

In just a few months, the project had recruited almost 7,300 armchair archaeologists from around the world, and after returning from their first trip to Kenya since it started the group says the results have been very promising.

Although they did not make any history altering discoveries, the team says the trip proved that the project is a major leap forward in hunting for fossils over large areas.

In one case, one of the online tip offs led to the group finding a bone measuring just five millimetres, a spine bone of a barbel fish, spotted by a volunteer fossil finder thousands of miles away.

Other finds included the skull of an extinct giant euthecodon crocodile, pelvis fragments from a fossil ungulate and a hippo tooth.

Project manager Dr Adrian Evans said: "We had a list of items people had spotted, and we found the items in 95 per cent of the cases.

"We are talking an area of over 20km, so it is a really big area to look. In one case there was a user who was certain they had spotted the imprint of a seed pod, but it ended up being dung.

"In another case someone was certain they had spotted the upper femur of an early hominid. It ended up being a bone from an antelope, but when we tell the people on the website they are still interested and take it well, even if they got it wrong.

"A big find for us was the barbel spine. It was only 5mm, and it was something you probably wouldn't have seen if you were searching for fossils without this help.

"We didn't find any hominid remains which is a shame, but they are very rare.

"The positive take away is that people were able to see these tiny things. If there are any hominid bones on the site we will definitely find them. It is only a matter of time. We've found great stuff, some fossils over a million years old, just not what we were after.

"There are still 80 per cent of the images left to look at. We've imaged just a fraction of the area, which is exactly why we need this technology so much.

"We're going to keep going out every six months. This is trail blazing stuff, it is the way forward for doing surveys of such large sites."

To take part in the project, a partnership between the university and Louise Leakey of the Turkana Basin Institute, visit http://fossilfinder.org/