I Make A Fossil

Long ago, I read the sad story of Johann Beringer, professor of medicine at the University of Würzburg in 18th-century Germany. He had hired some students to find and bring him fossils, but the boys made fake fossils of such amazing things as weird unknown creatures, celestial objects such as fallen stars, and even the Tetragrammaton. I'm not sure what he made of them (perhaps he believed in a form of spontaneous generation -- the weirder 'fossils' then could be explained as examples of the natural generative powers of the earth), but in any case he believed them all to be authentic and paid to have published a lavishly illustrated tome expounding his ideas based upon their 'evidence'.

He finally realized he'd been duped when he came across a 'fossil' of his own name, supposedly, and subsequently went about spending all his money buying up all the copies of the book he'd gone to so much trouble to have published, eventually dying a poor and broken man.

I like fossils. I also like fake fossils, whether deliberate hoaxes or accidental lookalikes. It's fun finding something that isn't a fossil but looks like one. I've even made my own.

Here is one such 'fossil', fashioned out of Sculpey®.

I think it's a kind of sea lily. I think it looks pretty good (I mean pretty naturalistic), but the color could be better; I may repaint it to look more like weathered stone.