Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was a very prominent zoologist. Among his many talents, he was an excellent painter and drew pictures of many animals and plants most of which though were microscopic aquatic animals. He described many species of Radiolaria, a subgroup of amoeboid Protozoa, which have mineral skeletons. In his published drawings is a picture of a radiolarian which I have tried to turn and carve which is shown.
It is holly turned as a 4.5 in. sphere, cut in half, hollowed to about 3/16 in. then glued back together. I then had to reduce each of the sections to about 3/32 in. leaving the equators 3/16 in. The piercing is an attempt to show the erosion of the exoskeleton as Haeckel had drawn. After lots of piercing, sanding, filling (each section took about four hours), I bleached the form to give a fossilized appearance. Broken off spikes on the equators are made by using slightly tinted artist acrylic gel medium.
