Life Voids
USNM PAL 535223 – Tylocidaris clavigera (Mantell, 1822)
Sea Urchin. Cretaceous period, England.
Early in April I had a conversation with the artist JR Carpenter, we share an interest in the mobilities and global connections that can be followed through focussing on smaller things. She goes mudlarking on the Thames, and has found sea urchin fossils there (see her instagram), including a mold of a sea urchin spine here. We’re going to see if there are similar fossils in the Smithsonian, and if we can have a conversation between them on Zoom.
These are JR’s images of sea urchin spines from instagram, where she says: “why yes I have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to identify long extinct species of sea urchins based on 145 to 66 million year old fossilised casts of their spines in flint nodules transported to the Thames foreshore in Cretaceous chalk laid as barge beds hundreds of years ago. haven’t got very far, but what even is time?”
It turned out that they are from the genus temnocidaris from the cretaceous period.
So the time period for these two fossils is the same, and they are both from chalk in England. Gideon Mantell is associated with this fossil, but its unclear whether this type of sea urchin has been named after him, or if he was the collector. In this page from the Natural History Museum in the UK his name is also listed under ‘type’
Image by JR Carpenter
Type Cidaris clavigera Mantell, 1822, p. 194, by subsequent designation of Lambert & Thiery, 1910, p. 156.
The original location that the fossil was found is part of the labelling, but it is harder to track down how each of the fossils got to where it is today: through movements in the sea as a live organism, to its fossilisation and movement with the rock around it, to being found by fossil hunters or miners, entering a collection, donation to a museum and further. But those movements seem to me to connect these incredibly long time periods with the brevity of an individual life, and the millenia defying permanence of becoming fossilised. The histories of finding, collecting, and classifying in museums – who got to do that work, who got to name the fossil seem to follow colonial forms of power.
And then there is the mold and the fossil. The creature and its habitat, or what forms around it. How to socially situate collections with all their strings attached?