Museum Piece

When I found this in the rubble above the beach at Charmouth, in Dorset, a couple of years ago, I was convinced it was a dinosaur bone. After all, that's the epicentre of the "Jurassic Coast", where loads of dinosaur fossils wash up.

So I took it to the Sedgwick Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, to have them identify it. The staff were all curious but not convinced it was a bone. After a lot of digging and sending photos to the Natural History Museum in London, they decided that it was a fossil sponge: possibly raphidonema, about 170 million years old. 

They were interested in keeping it in their collection, for further study, as it was so unusually large, but that would have meant cutting into it, so I decided to keep it in our little museum at home.

I had a reasonably relaxing Saturday. Took my old crashed PC in to recover files finally. Watched a bit of F1 qualifying. Read a book. Worked on a photo album. Cooked dinner. Avoided work.