The Cretaceous Sea Urchin Pendant comes in both small and large sizes, with either a prong or bezel setting. The setting and additional components of all necklaces are sterling silver, including an 18" (45cm) chain (Small: box-style, Large: wheat-style.) The bail is large enough to accommodate a heavier chain or cord for a more masculine appearance.

Small Sea Urchin Pendants measure between 0.5"-1" and large pendants measure over 1".

The necklace comes with a handsome display/storage box and a small information card that also serves as the certificate of authenticity.

"One of the most lavishly furnished bell beaker burials yet found in Europe," -Dr. Andrew Fitzpatrick describing an early burial site decorated with fossil sea urchins.

For thousands of years, human cultures have collected strange stones marked with natural etchings. These stones have been known by many names and purposes, thunderstones, fairy loaves, shepherds’ crowns, but their true origin is far older.

450 million years ago, the first ancient sea urchins appeared in the prehistoric seas. These strange creatures scoured the seafloor for algae and other nutrients to eat, crawling along their motile spines and “tube feet.”

These animals, known scientifically as echinoids, have survived all the way to the modern-day by fulfilling a very specific niche in their ecosystem. Their small bodies and simple nervous systems don’t require much energy, so an urchin can survive quite easily off small pieces of vegetation that float past.

Their iconic spines deter most predators from attempting to eat them, meaning they don’t have to expend much energy on muscular movement either. In fact, the urchin’s main mode of travel consists of a series of fluid sacs that swell and shrink with seawater. These “tube feet” can only reach up to speeds of a few inches a day, but that’s more than enough for them to find a new source of food.

Our fascination with these creatures has a very long history. Archaeologists have uncovered 4,000-year-old tombs from Ancient Egypt that contained fossilized urchins as a kind of grave good. In Bronze Age Britain, people were buried surrounded by dozens of fossils as pictured here.

In Hampshire, England there is a church that has stood for over 700 years on a place that was an ocean millions of years ago. The windows of this church are lined with the so-called “thunderstones,” fossilized urchins that would have been collected by 12th-century masons. Their placement in the church indicates that they held a strong significance to those who built it.

These ancient fossil collectors are quite similar to all of us, just as engrossed in the strange origins of the stones as we are today. It’s unlikely they would have known or even understood the truly ancient age of the things they wore around their neck, but archaeologists believed they may have recognized them as a sort of stone animal. Perhaps in burying them with their dead, they understood that these fossils were a remnant of a long-passed creature.