5" Carved Black Coquina Stone Turtle - California

This stone started out as a silica-rich mud full of accumulated shell fragments known as a coquina. Coquina is actually the Spanish word for cockleshells or shellfish. Coquinas accumulate in high-energy marine environments such as coastlines where currents and waves result in the abrasion, fracturing, and sorting of the shells that compose them. Over time, these shell fragments fossilized and the silica-rich mud turned into a jasper.