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I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
91–100 of 127 posts
Re: I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
#92Are you sure that's a fossil and not just a rook that happens to look kinda like a snail's shell?
Finding a chess piece out there would be very interesting
Re: I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
#93I have quite an early memory of being on the somewhat remote property in Australia that my mother grew up on (Central NSW, near Condobolin).
My Uncle, who then ran the property, walked over to a rock, whacks it with a hammer or similar, shows me a bit of a trilobite (which are totally different to our sort of bytes). He did this a bunch of times. I still have the rocks. No amazing full horizontal cross-sections, but it certainly got my very young mind excited.
There were fossils RIGHT THERE from before there were dinosaurs!
Oh, and that central Australia used to be an Ocean!
These clear demos to young kids, or adults, are great, and the many other examples here in the comments are a testament to that (Vienna? wtf!).
Re: I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
#94One thing that will have thrown the author off the trail is that he is holding a fossil of the organic parts of the snail and that is essentially a cast of the animal, not the shell. They are known as Steinkerns (stonecore).
The insides get replaced by minerals, which harden, the shell dissolves, then the only fossil remaining is a mould of the inside of what used to be the shell.
So on a fundamental level, the headline is wrong. He did not find any sort of shell...
Re: I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
#95The analysis is nice, flashy, and wrong. Several weak assumptions here leading to hallucinate an obviously wrong result.
Taxonomy IS a science. Just use the wide corpse of knowledge that has been built for the last 229 years, where the class Gastropoda was created.
First wrong assumption. This is a seashell.
This probably is a seashell, yes.
But fresh water snails have also shells; and savannas can have a lot of lagoons before eventually turning into deserts. If you train your model only using zebras, your model will happily conclude than an hippo is a sort of non stripped obese zebra.
Re: I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
#96I found an article about finding a seashell in the middle of the desert on GitHub...
More seriously, I wonder if there's anything inside. Somewhat reminds me of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coso_artifact
Re: I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
#97Re: I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
#98The analysis is nice, flashy, and wrong. Several weak assumptions here leading to hallucinate an obviously wrong result. Taxonomy IS a science. Just use the wide corpse of knowledge that has been built for the last 229 years, where the class Gastropoda was created. First wrong assumption. This is a seashell. This probably is a seashell, yes. But fresh water snails have also shells; and savannas can have a lot of lago…
More points for though
1) The model use incomplete data. The data used to train the model is based in 7800 species alive. After wikipedia, Gastropoda have more than 75000 species alive, plus 15000 fossil species known. (We can assume safely that this is a snail, but remember that some cephalopods also have coiled shells).
2) The model use spurious data. All clams and Tusk shells must be removed (because we want to classify a snail). This means that the number of snails available to train the model is much lower than 7800. Including non-snails just gives us a false confidence in the strength of our model.
3) The model covers only one couple traits in this species, but this particular traits can vary within members of the same species. Taxonomy uses thousands of traits to classify a mollusc and some are particularly fastididious. Dozens of items only to describe the shell. Often the soft parts are needed (Is the penis shaped like a club? this genus, shaped like a whip? this other one; the penis in your sample is contracted because you didn't put to sleep the animal first with mint crystals, though luck, we'll never know).
4) The model is based in extant alive species, but we want to identify a fossil. Alive species have non-distorted shells. Fossils often lose their shape by the weight of sediments and compression. Only the thickest shells would keep its real height/wide proportions.
5) The model ignores important details. The species found in the desert has a very evident shell groove at the top of the spire, that the targeted species does not have. This alone, tells a newbie taxonomist that the result is wrong.
Re: I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
#99Why would you write a lot of software to find the closest match (which doesn't even seem that good) if you could also ask a subject expert? I guess you could even just post a photo to some subreddit with people who could tell you what it is...
Also: "it shouldn't be here; the nearest coastline is Dammam's, 500 km away." - are people really that ignorant about plate tectonics and sea fossils in mountains?
Re: I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
#100I found a seashell in the middle of the forest in (well inland) Mississippi. That was an interesting find, and lead me to learn that much of the continental US used to be covered in a sea, I believe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interior_Seaway
This means the shell was dozens of millions of years old, and may be the oldest thing I’ve ever held, except maybe some rocks.