Neptune's Goblet

The trip to Oxford's Museum of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum coalesced like some metaphysical experiment. One minute you're at Victoria Station in bustling London, and the next you  find yourself in a quiet university town, complete with fantastical Harry Potter vignettes and hidden university courtyards. Another metaphysical twist was encountering Cliona patera, also known as Neptune's Goblet, a sea sponge thought to have become extinct in the early 1900s--only to pop back up on history's timeline, a hundred years later, in 2011. Oxford's specimen captured my attention with its stippled surface, exposed fissures and its interior cellular structure revealed by erosion and punctuated time. Three days after encountering Neptune's Goblet, I photographed the piece below: