Abandoned Neighborhood

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The other day I noticed this rock in our yard. I looked a bit closer, and found that it had all these little holes on it's surface. They were very small, maybe 1/20 of 1mm across. I turned it over, and saw that the rock was actually a shell, and that it looked as if the outer layer has been rubbed off revealing the internal struture of the shell itself.

I thought it'd be cool to photograph, and so I set up two lights obliquely to either side and used a 50mm lens with about 11cm extension. I found that what I thought was the internal structure was actually on top; it became apparent that what I was looking at were hundreds of thousands of tiny little homes for some tiny little sea creature. From a distance, they look organized into little rows.

It's amazing that such an itsy bitsy thing could be capable of constructing something like this. For scale, the photograph below is maybe 1x1mm.

6338460746_0e3e0b26f2_b.jpg
 
That's a really neat find. :D I like those "waves" on the surface. I wonder who used to live there. And when.
 
I'm kind of wondering if it's some kind of coral?
 
It looks like that. Considering where you found it, it must have a very interesting history.
 

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