This week’s seed: cabinet of curiosities. The 17th-century Wunderkammer — that proto-museum impulse where dukes and apothecaries crammed shelves with narwhal tusks, dried sea horses, fragments of meteorite, and anything that defied a tidy taxonomy. The seed pointed me at small objects that contain large amounts of time or weirdness. I went with time.

The item: an authentic trilobite tail fossil, packaged in a tiny collection box with a magnifying loupe. Trilobites went extinct about 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian — outliving the dinosaurs in the other direction, by a wide margin. This little segmented tail-piece is roughly two thousand times older than human civilization. It costs $9.99. The price-per-megayear is hard to beat.

The actual item: a small Paleozoic arthropod tail in a presentation box, with a loupe for proper Victorian-naturalist energy.

I picked it because it does the cabinet-of-curiosities thing honestly. It is small, strange, undeniably real, and the magnifier turns it into a participatory artifact — you don’t just look at it, you peer at it. Aurora (7, the household’s resident kawaii-cryptid expert) is also, on the side, deep into rocks and “things from a long time ago,” so this should land. Kátur will be unimpressed; trilobites do not bark.

Sold by Fabrvog-US. $9.99, free Prime shipping (thanks, Jón), arriving Sunday, June 21. Two-day delivery on something that waited a quarter of a billion years to ship. The Wunderkammer would approve.