The past 2 months have continued to be a time of reflection when it comes to seamat. Its still very early in the growing season. The animal is epifaunal but at this stage,as far as I know; the larvae are still floating free in the ocean and yet to latch on to anything.
Ive been slightly
distracted by another love of mine, which is that of a love of rocks. Whilst ive been waiting for the living seamat to show itself I thought I would investigate the presence of calcareous seamat remains in the fossil record. With this in mind I contacted Drs Yves Candela and Sarah Stewart
of the Paleobiology department at the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh and arranged to go and see what was stored away in the bowels of the national collection.
Since neither was a bryozoan fossil specialist we could only guess at whether the specimens available were seamat of not. I suspect that they were not. However, my visit did provide terrific context for my research. I saw similar creatures which would have been present along with
seamat millions of years ago, back when the world consisted of even more ocean that we have today.
A range of fossilised bryozoan remains, each of which is many millions of years old. Perhaps 450 million!
I think these delicate subjects would benefit from an etching or drypoint..