Comment by My_Name
7 hours ago
One 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...
I've been told by a friend -- a wierd thing -- in many places you can dig a hole and it will fill with water. And at some point in the future fish will be swimming in it.
Splitting hairs in bad faith is not constructive to the points being made here.
True, but I actually had no idea that it was the soft parts rather than the hard parts that had been fossilized. (I haven’t verified it yet.) Either way, it didn’t read like a bad faith interpretation/comment.
It wasn't written to be one. If the author went to the trouble of making a 3D space filled with many shells, knowing the actual shell was most likely a different shape would be something they would probably want to know, so the position of their fossil could be placed more accurately in the graphed space.
No, a layperson doing a bunch of math but barking up the wrong tree theory-wise is actually super instructive for this forum of autodidacts.
And I say that as one of the autodidacts.
Reads to me like a fascinating and relevant distinction.
how is that splitting hairs? it’s an actual interesting point