Sep 29th Sea Potato

One advantage of living beside an uncleaned beach is finding things that you have to go and look up. I knew this was from a living thing but had no idea what. It turns out this shell from a dead creature is known as a 'test'.  Proper name Echinocardium cordatum, aka 'Sea Potato' or 'Heart Urchin'. The beach was littered with these small almost baseball like casings. I was not familiar with them and apparently dogs will not go near them. So delicate a firmish grip shatters them.

QUOTE:
“They are quite common at the lower end of the right type of sandy beach, living below the sand in burrows,” said Martin Attrill, director of the marine institute at Plymouth University. “You get lots of them on Torbay main beach, for example. “They are related to starfish and usually covered with little spines.”

Sea Potato