Another close up of an object on display in the museum. Which secretive animal is this?

Object of the week

Did you know what last week’s object of the week was?

Well done if you recognised this was one of the corals on display from the Moncrieff collection. This particular specimen is a perfect example of Fungia danai.

Corals are marine animals in the phylum Cnidaria, which also includes jellyfish. They are colonies made up of many individual polyps, which are tiny animals which have a mouth surrounded with a ring of tentacles.

The skeleton secreted by the polyps is all that remains of the dead coral – when alive the animal can be brightly coloured in shades of purple, brown, green or blue.