Hello from Hawaii! All this talk of dinosaurs and awesome tiki goodness has got us a little bit overly excited. It's not hard to see why, right? Today we thought we would invite over one of our favourite people to tell us a little bit more about fossils and dinosaurs... oh! And you might have noticed she makes some killer jewellery out of it all too :D
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Hello! My name is Kim - you may remember me from Peaches and Pebbles, in fact! I'm here today on Vivid's request to talk about some of my newest and, personally, more exciting products - but this isn't a post screaming "buy me! buy me!", instead it's a very educational post! I hope you find it as ridiculously interesting as I do!
I'll start off by telling you this simple fact: I love dinosaurs. The idea that creatures as big and fierce (and also docile) as T-Rex ever walked the earth is mind-boggling, but the more documentaries I watch, the more books and magazines I read, the more I come to understand them and their existance. I think they were amazing.
You can understand from this fact that I also love to collect fossils. It's not dinosaurs in particular, it's anything once-living. I have fossils over 300 million years old. But I decided one day that this wasn't a passion I wanted to keep to myself. So I took some fossils - ones found and ones sourced - and I put them into a context where I felt I'd have some success in sharing them with the world.
I made jewellery out of them.
Vivid Please have picked out some of their favourites, and I'm here to tell you a little more about them...
This is a trilobite. This one specifically is from the Cambrian period (541-485 million years ago), which was a turning point in history where, while animals still didn't have much in the way of a skeleton, they did begin to develop exoskeletons, of a sort. The trilobite was one of the most successful creatures that came about during this period, and the species as a whole lasted for around 250 million years. That's a long, long time - humans (of the genus Homo) have been around for about 2 million years, though it's been suggested that members of the hominin lineage date as far back as 7 million years. That's still barely a scratch on Trilobites.
The interesting thing about trilobites is that their eye lenses were made of calcite. That is more or less rock. Yes, rock. This actually meant that their vision was more or less better than that of any other living thing during the Cambrian!
Trilobites are one of my absolute favourites because of the many different shapes they took on, and I was so excited to find these tiny ones! Some species grew up to 1.5 metres!
These might just look like fragments of rock - well, I suppose that's what a fossil is, really - but these are in fact dinosaur eggshell fragments. Fragments of an actual dinosaur eggshell. Like bones, these were able to fossilise over the millions of years they have been in physical existance. I absolutely adore them. These were eggshells belonging to a Titanosaur, one of the biggest sauropods. Even just holding this small fragment on your finger, you can see a slight curvature. That, plus the thickness, shows how big these eggs were. Whether they were fertilised or not, and if they were whether or not the creature inside survived, is all part of the wonder of these fragments. They're my utter favourites for this fact. They may have contained life, or they may have contained another creature's dinner!
This one really does just look like a rock, but I promise you it's much more than that. This is actually a fragment of a dinosaur bone. I have no idea what it is from, 'nor indeed what bone it is, but it's been weathered down and rounded over a few million years since it was exposed from the rock it was fossilised in. It's from the cretaceous period, which is basically the golden age of dinosaurs, and was found on the Isle of Wight here in England. Now, being a bone, unlike the eggshell, it is certain that this was from a living thing. I don't personally know if it was an adult or juvenile, 'nor if it died of natural causes or attack, but it is astounding none the less.
These are the same as the other dinosaur eggshell fragments shown above, but had shattered into a different shape. But what I'm sure you're asking by now is why they've been painted, and, now, glittered. As I said above, I wanted to try to get other people interested in the astounding world of natural history, and I felt one way to do that was to take away from the frankly drab colours by adding a splash of something brighter - or shinier. This is all I can do to generate visual interest. Anything more would be damaging. None of these fossils are drilled, and while the paint is permanent, using the right chemicals can get the stuff off - and those "right" chemicals aren't damaging to the fossil, either. Basically, if you really wanted to, with a bit of trouble, each piece of jewellery could be taken apart from its sterling silver components, and the fossil easily salvaged. I love the way I've done it, personally, it really appeals to me, though I have yet to make myself a pair of the earrings.
This last piece is an ammonite - a sort of squid-like creature that lived within a shell much like snails do today. These could get enormous. They are one of the most recognisable fossils, alongside trilobites, and they existed between 400-65 million years ago. Somewhat longer than the trilobites, but I find them a little less exciting. Still, they're impressive, with their own range of shapes and sizes. Not all ammonites are round, you know! They're so very common, though. Whenever I go down to the coast of Clevedon I always stare at the seawalls. Not the horizon, or the "sand", or anything else, just the walls, because the sheer number of ammonites embedded within them is insane. So many little long-extinct life forms are encased within just one metre of the wall, and sometimes I have to actively stop myself from parking my bum on the pavement and staring at it!
I hope you liked my little presentation - and thanks so very much to Vivid Please for their on-going support of all things handmade! And of myself, of course! I also hope you all learned something today. There are a huge number of documentaries on things like this, my favourite being "First Life" with David Attenborough, which details the information we have about where, how and when life on this planet first began...
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Aww! Thanks so much Kim! What an inspirational post :D I can't wait to show you pictures from our little adventure; you're going to have a field day!
We'd love to hear what you think about Kim's jewellery. Don't you think she just made history AWESOME? If all my school lessons came with a cute accessory I would have paid much closer attention :D
Each piece from the Ediacara collection comes beautifully wrapped and with free shipping too! Discover your favorites on the Ediacara website or in Kim's online shop...
Happy Hunting!
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