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My_Name | parent | next
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...

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rf15 | parent
Splitting hairs in bad faith is not constructive to the points being made here.
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throwaway5765 | parent | next
"He swam at my feet, Powerful arms in broad strokes Sweeping the sand. So I asked this man, What seas do you swim? And to this he answered, 'I have seen shells and the like On this desert floor, So I swim this land's memory Thus honouring its past,' Is the journey far, queried I. 'I cannot say,' he replied, 'For I shall drown long before I am done.'"

― Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates

Quarrel | parent | next
I 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!).

purplehat_ | parent | next
Cool find and a very interesting analysis!

There's a lot more to morphology than just the shape of the shell, and indeed the shape can sometimes be misleading, in that very different species can have somewhat similar shells, and different individuals of the same species can have quite different shell shapes. You've got a gasteropod, so it would be good to pay special attention to the peristome and siphonal canal (based on the bio classes I took in the area, I'm no expert) but of course there's lots of features that could be helpful in an identification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastropod_shell#Parts_of_the_s... is a good list, and maybe you've already done this but you would want to find a dichotomous key of gasteropod families native to the area to narrow it down. Good luck in figuring out your shell!

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andix | parent | next
St. Stephens cathedral in Vienna was built with sandstone that contains seashells. It's hundreds of kilometers away from the shore, but ~15 million years ago the area where it stands now was a seabed.

The stones are not from the exact location where it was built, but from close by. The quarry where the stones came from hundreds of years ago is still active, and you can find tons of fossils there. It's practically impossible to get a piece of rock from there without visible seashells.

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gerdesj | parent | next
Thank you for a great write up. Concise, to the point and really interesting.

It would be nice if your local detractors noticed your steely insistence on remarking where you are coming from.

I think it would be superb if some ... experts ... in most spaces learned about the beauty of brevity.

helterskelter | parent | next
Herodotus did it first, and even speculated that that region must have been covered by water at some point.
LeonB | parent
Herodotus wouldn’t have written it quite the same — no Jupyter notebook for example, Jupiter being a Roman term; the nearest equivalent for the Ancient Greeks was Zeus.
VileSquirrel | root | parent
Safe to assume Herodotus would have used a Zeus notebook.
gaiagraphia | parent | next
I've got some 'shells' from the deserts near Siwa Oasis. Quite a cool feeling walking on top of what used to be the floor of the Tethys Ocean, especially when everything around you is just rock and sand without a drop of water in sight.
Suppafly | parent | next
Cool write up, a little weird that you were surprised to find it in the first place though.
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brennanpeterson | parent | next
"If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone."

John McPhee from the wonderful Annals of the former world

roenxi | parent | next
I also recommend a quick search for "whale skeleton mountaintop". The mythology of dragons probably came from a find like that.
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userbinator | parent | next
I 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

hendry | parent | next
I found a sea shell in a visit to Latamber in Pakistan (NWFP): https://www.flickr.com/photos/hendry/73369720/

Gemini says "As the crow flies (Straight-line distance): Approximately 900 to 920 kilometers (roughly 560 to 570 miles) directly north of the coast at Karachi"

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HiPhish | parent | next
Are you sure that's a fossil and not just a rook that happens to look kinda like a snail's shell?
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iSnow | parent | next
Why 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?

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hawtads | parent | next
He is losing a lot of information in that normalization pipeline (whole shell reduced/feature engineered into nothing but an outline). A CNN or something similar would be better and he can maybe get a better depth map of the mouth shape.
Cockbrand | parent | next
She sells seashells in the Sahara was my first association, but then the article clearly states that we're talking about a different desert.
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pvaldes | parent | next
The 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.

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danieldrehmer | parent | next
Awesome, someone finally found one of the seashells I drop for entertainment when I go for a ride across the desert
motyar | parent | next
I found may under 12feet in desert of Thar, India.

It was River or flood deposited according to my research.

throw310822 | parent | next
Looks like ampullospira, documented in Saudi Arabia. Age (middle-upper Jurassic) and actual location also match.
canyp | parent | next
Very interesting story and also hands-on walkthrough of PCA.
ta9ta9008da | parent | next
This loading screen looks great!
LadyCailin | parent | next
I 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.

TheMagicHorsey | parent | next
It's interesting that saying the Earth is more than 10,000 years old is not haram in Saudi Arabia. I thought it would be, since they are so religious, but it turns out the Koran doesn't make any claims about the age of the Earth, so you are free to say that the Earth is billions of years old and not be accused of blasphemy.
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paulpauper | parent | next
Even with AI, to try to replicate this on my own would take me a really long time, maybe impossible. Despite the use of AI,it would be a huge undertaking , such as having to come up with the blueprint and procedure for classifying the shells, setting up all of the environments, setting up repository, understanding the math, writing it up, coding the tool, etc.

This should allay fears that AI will render people jobless or automate everything.

muenalan | parent | next
land snails ?
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d--b | parent | next
Snails have shells too. Just saying
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analogpixel | parent | next
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markdown | parent | next
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charcircuit | parent | next
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tomstuart | parent | next
Among a strong field, this is the single most depressing comment I’ve ever read on Hacker News. Several grim components but it’s the “I don’t understand why” which seals the deal.
paulpauper | root | parent | next
how is it depressing? that seems a tad strong. Maybe disappointment is the correct feeling
orf | root | parent
Why? Calling a reasonable thing grim without any follow-up isn’t the hallmark of a good comment either.
bigstrat2003 | root | parent
It is not remotely reasonable to ask "but why didn't he feed it to ChatGPT?". It is pretty silly to assume that ChatGPT should always be consulted.
charcircuit | root | parent | next
It's a good starting place. As an analogy imagine someone wanted to look up the definition of a word. If someone wanted to know the definition and they went out and crawled the entire internet, built an LLM, and then asked it for the definition you would wonder why they didn't check an existing dictionary first. I wouldn't consider it silly at all to always check a dictionary or existing LLM first when you want to know the definition of a word.

Wanting to know the definition of a word is not an original problem. Similarly wanting to know what's in an image is not a new problem either.

throw310822 | root | parent
I understand this is more about the process than the result, but note that: a) his result is completely wrong, he identifies a living land snail as the 100+MYa fossil; b) a conversation with Claude helps with some decent knowledge and provides a few possible candidates, that can be then double checked. c) Claude could have talked the author out of trying to identify a Jurassic fossil against a database of living species.
Azantys | parent | next
I trust a proper solution (even though I can be certain how accurate it is), which compares to a known dataset much more than just giving it an AI. For identifying current living species it is probably fine but this is something to nice for an AI to be trustable. Also this path is much more fun and you learn sonething along the way!
ry-grah | parent | next
but, from my understanding what the author was really wanting was an adventure and to learn new things. he gained so much more than just learning what type of shell it is
cyclopeanutopia | parent | next
Maybe he's not an idiot?
saaaaaam | parent | next
Who says the whole analysis isn’t AI inspired?
charcircuit | root | parent
No one. I'm pointing out there are existing AI models that can do this that the author could have tried before investing all the work to build his own.
fzeroracer | root | parent
> investing all the work to build his own.

I don't think you understand why the author did this on a fundamental level. Sometimes it isn't explicitly about getting the outcome directly, it's about putting in the work to understand how you get there.

charcircuit | root | parent
The article says that the author wanted to have an analysis done, but ruled out the option of a human doing it. He did not rule out using a multimodal LLM. It's possible that he just is unaware that multimodal LLMs are capable of doing an analysis. Considering the approach wasn't mentioned in the article one can guess that the author just didn't know it was possible. But there is no way to know for sure.
sam_goody | parent | next
The AI would confidently give him the wrong answer, since it has no way to provide the correct answer, and doesn't know its own limitations. (Or however you wish to describe "hallucinations", which is about as accurate as my description ;))

And he would think he has the right answer, perhaps write up an essay about his findings, which later AI bots will read and learn from, propgating the mistake...

CamperBob2 | root | parent | next
The AI would confidently give him the wrong answer

There is irony here that does not sleep.

throw310822 | root | parent
Wait, the author identified the shell as "Sphincterochila candidissima". Which is a living species of air-breathing land snail, a terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusk. Completely off.
kaka314 | parent | next
Because it’s much more fun that way
sublinear | parent
Is this example of vector search not "AI" enough?
addandsubtract | root | parent
GenAI is the new AI, now, unfortunately. PapersWithCode died for this.
paradoxyl | parent | next
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saaaaaam | parent | next
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croisillon | parent | next
couldn't it be a snail?
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