A Dinosaur Stood Here

   It didn't really. It's just a carving - and in the UK most of what you'll find are aquatic dinosaurs, anyway, and not many of them really 'stood' anywhere.

   Some time ago I introduced you to the amazing stone worker, James Lamb. I still wish custard creams came so big.

   Well, I was super lucky recently and received my own unique piece of his work! It's absolutely perfect in many ways, and it really shows his creativity as well as his skill!

   Anyone who knows me knows I'm a dinosaur and natural history nut. I want to be a published fantasy author above absolutely everything else, but my fallback profession would be geology if I wasn't so nervous about the idea of going back to school, maybe specifically volanology if not paleontology. Rocks have always fascinated me - if I walk along a coastline I'm not looking out to sea - what the hell is there to look at out there?! No, I'll be staring at the cliffs, at the history standing right in front of me, and rather naively looking for giant skulls. I know, I know, it's England, best I can hope for is a Kimmerosaurus. And no, I'm not making that up.

   So when James wanted to send me a small piece of stone work I'd made of a dinosaur foot print, I was over the moon.

   Look at it. Look at it. It's been carved into a stone with other fossils in it.

   And yes, it's as heavy as it looks.

   The shape of the footprint is amazing, and the work that went into shaping it is just as wonderful. Unfortunately the picture doesn't do it justice. It's modelled after theropod trace fossils - typically big carnivores like T-Rex and the like - and the carving itself is nice and rough, which contrasts to the rest of the stone which is perfectly smooth and filled with mollusc fossils. The one thing that's always annoyed me about trace fossils is that they're just prints - either moulds or casts - and there's never any colour to them because there was nothing there to mineralise. You can only see the footprints by the shadows cast over them. I made little trace fossils out of clay when I was little but I always painted the footprint black because you couldn't see it. But that's nature, and, this time around, I find myself loving that this footprint is just an indent. As it should be.

   I'm really excited about owning this piece - more exicted than I should be - and it's joined my pitiful little fossil collection (I say pitiful because it's small and filled with common things, but there are 3 things of note in there: a fish, a pleiosaur vertebrae and a fragment of a titanosaur eggshell which was actually the first thing Seeg ever gave me). But as small and simple as my collection is, I'm proud of it, and I'm glad to add this faux fossil to the mix!