Coral after the sea has gone. What survives is the hard architecture of the colony: the calcium-carbonate skeleton the living polyps built around themselves, now emptied out into tunnels, pores, branching edges and a kind of accidental lacework. The animal is long gone; the building it made is the fossil.

It works as a display object because it reads at once as marine life, as sculpture and as pattern. It comes on a stand, which is included. Like our other natural-history pieces, it came to us at auction from a regional Victorian museum collection, dispersed when the museum closed.