Every once in a while, as I’m perusing old posts (because the ego knows no bounds,) I come across this image and, just about every time, I interpret it entirely incorrectly – which is bonkers because not only am I the one who photographed it, I had the subject right in hand and know exactly how it looks. The last two times, I reminded myself I should revisit it as an optical illusion post, and this time, I finally did it.
Here’s the original image, from a post back in 2021:
Just an unknown fossil personally collected from central New York (“upstate,” the Finger Lakes region) on one of my trips. But does it go up, or down? In other words, is the fossil raised/domed or impressed/dug out? I too often see it entirely wrong and then have a really hard time trying to see it correctly, and really, I’m not bad at things like this (or at least, so I tell myself) – I can usually see the reverse almost at will, certainly with little effort, but this one can frustrate me for several seconds or more. So I finally decided to so a video of it, since I had the original fossil still on hand.
I tried to match the original photo as closely as possible for the video, especially the light angle, and then managed to play with the fancy options within Kdenlive (my video editing program) to morph between the still image from 2021 and the video shot tonight, trying to match the position and size – I’m pleased with the result (that ego thing again.) And even as the video was closing and I replaced the fossil into its original position, the illusion even played with my eyes again. Maybe you never saw it that way – I’m never sure whether someone else sees what I do, or is as fooled by it.
A quick note though: the original fossil had been broken in two pieces sometime in the interim, likely in the move last year, but it was clean enough that I glued it back together – it cut right across those grooves and even I’m hard-pressed to see where the crack is. If you look closely at the beginning of the video as the still image morphs into the ‘live’ one, you can see a chip missing from the lower right side of the fossil impression – the crack goes straight up from that.
I still have a small box full of fossil rocks that show a lot of promise, and at some point I’ll sit down on video and record the opening of some of them – that way we’ll both see the revelation of these former critters for the first time in 415 million years. The inclusion of the fossils made the shale very unstable and weak, and often it can be split apart with fingernails. My biggest regret, though, is that age thing; it’s way before land animals even existed, so these are all water-dwellers, thus what we might see are molluscs, crustaceans, and plants, the most impressive/recognizable of which may be trilobites (which I have yet to find in larger, decent form.)
But yeah, I can still come across that photo up there again, and be convinced that the light comes from lower left and see only a raised shape, having a hard time correcting this mentally. Maybe this is some sign of impending senility…