even*cleveland: clam shells, pine cones and dinosaur bones

clam shells, pine cones and dinosaur bones

The last time I walked through the Hall of Gems at the American Museum of Natural History, three particular opals caught my eye. Their shape was familiar but I couldn't place it, so I looked closer, and discovered that they were fossilized clams. After I snapped a picture, I went home to do a bit of research.

According to the Australian Opal Center:

Opal forms in cavities within rocks. If a cavity has formed because a bone, shell or pinecone was buried in the sand or clay that later became the rock, and conditions are right for opal formation, then the opal forms a fossil replica of the original object that was buried.

In 1987, a miner found a near-complete opalized pliosaur fossil, which is in the collection of the Australian Museum. The Addyman Plesiosaur, another near-complete opalized fossil, is on display at the South Australian Museum. There don't seem to be any great photos of either specimen online, but just knowing that such a thing exists is amazing. Just imagine: a glimmering, iridescent, meters-long opal skeleton.

Not to mention opal pine cones and sea shells.

From top:

Fossilized opal pine cone, found at Opal Auctions.

Opalized wood specimen, found at Bonhams.

Opalized belemnite shell in rock, found at Opal Auctions.

Lot of four opalized clam shells, found at Bonhams.

More opal fossils to look at here.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

clam shells, pine cones and dinosaur bones

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