I may have shown you this before, but who cares? Not me!
I was sitting in a pub garden in Lacock, Wiltshire, not far from where most of the Harry Potter films were made, when I looked down at the gravel and saw a small fossil sea-shell.
I picked it up and as soon as I turned it over I saw the fossil star stuck to one side.
I showed it to H.I. and - not having seen this sort of juxtaposition before - she was amazed and bewildered, thinking it must have been something I had made myself.
The star is, in fact, a couple of segments from an ancient plant stem which had disintegrated about 130 million years ago and settled on the shell to fossilise with it.
The camera focussed on the table top rather than the star, but sadly I cannot take another photo because it has gone missing and I cannot find it.
I heard a museum attendant say that he told a child that one particular exhibit was 130,000,012 years old, and the child asked how he could have been so precise about the 'and 12' age.
He explained that when he first started working at the museum, the exhibit had a label attached to it saying that it was 130 million years old, and that was twelve years ago.
0 Yorumlar