Search Results Confirm Sea Urchin; Dorset Collector Loses An Argument With A Search Bar

"Is this a meteorite?" That was the opening sentence of the post, filed at 11:40 on a Tuesday by Marie Miller, who had brought the object into the shop on East Street still wrapped in a tea towel. The photograph showed a rounded, grey-white lump the size of a fist, faintly segmented on one face, with a shallow dimple where a button of chalk had once sat.

Within four minutes the answer had arrived, unsolicited, from the search bar. It said sea urchin.

"It said sea urchin," Marie said. "So I took a second photo and asked again. It still said sea urchin, but from a slightly different angle."

The object had come out of a chalk bank on the Dorset coast, and Marie had carried it down the path in her jacket pocket with the care people reserve for things they intend to be argued about. It was not a cannonball, because it was too light. It was not a nodule, because it had what she described as a pattern.

"A pattern is not a crust," said Frank Martinez, who runs the identification bench and has said so before.

Frank turned it once on the steel tray and did not reach for the magnet. The surface took a streak: pale, chalky, the mark of something that would also fizz under a weak acid and scratch under a knife. He held it beside a coin for scale, noted the segmentation, and returned it to the tea towel.

"It's an echinoid," he said. "Chalk-hosted. Whatever the machine told you, it told you correctly for once."

Marie had already photographed it at home from nine angles and uploaded it under three crops, the last so tight that the search bar offered, she said, "a fairly confident plate of pasta."

"The pasta one was a bad result," she said. "I didn't put that one forward."

The shop keeps settled matters in a display case near the till. Marie's object went in without argument, on a card. Frank had offered the streak, the hardness and the acid, in that order, and had been told, politely, that the search bar had covered it.

"He was very thorough," Marie said. "The bar was quicker."

Then Tammy Voss appeared, thanked Marie in front of four people for volunteering to lead the coastal section of the spring outing, and moved on before Marie could establish when she had agreed. Marie is now leading the coastal section of the spring outing.

The card reads sea urchin, with the genus beneath. Marie objects to nothing on it. She has asked, twice, that the case be moved a little to the left, where the morning light from the door shows the segmentation better.

The shop moved it. It is now a little to the left.

The same shop posts next month with a new object and the identical opening sentence.