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...
And I say that as one of the autodidacts.
― Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates
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!).
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!
I was most surprised that you could flatten a 3d structure down to 2d and not lose so much information that it would cause a very high rate of error. Someone else was skeptical enough to do a study as a critique on it, only to have it retracted. (funny in light of this post)
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.
Everybody who cares at least slightly knows this, and I am pretty sure author knows this too, he could have spared us the initial hyperbole. Analysis itself is good but not everything needs to read like dramatic novel.
If all the ice melted it would raise the oceans by something like 230 feet, so modern Vienna would still be above water at 495 – 1778 ft elevation.
Although some estimates suggest Earth loses 20 - 30 cubic kilometres of water to space annually. Plus whatever water is bound up in mineralisation annually.
450 million cubic kilometres of water lost over a 15 million year period would lower ocean by something like … a bit?
The total volume of water on Earth is presently estimated to be around the 1.386 billion cubic kilometre mark.
The volume of a sphere increases to the cube of its radius … carry the 1 … nup, that’s to hard for me.
Beach front property in Vienna, at a guess?
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-would-sea-level-change-if-all-...
https://www.ewash.org/how-much-water-disappears-from-earth-e...
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/the-water-c...
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.
John McPhee from the wonderful Annals of the former world
More seriously, I wonder if there's anything inside. Somewhat reminds me of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coso_artifact
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"
An incredibly detailed and descriptive map:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/1964_Pak...
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?
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.
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.
Sphincterochila candidissima is a western Mediterranean species. It lives from Spain to Libia. The fossil is from Saudi Arabia.
It was River or flood deposited according to my research.
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.
I can't think of a country where you even might be accused of blasphemy, though I'll admit I am not very familiar with the topic.
This should allay fears that AI will render people jobless or automate everything.
[;)]
... At this time of the day?
... In this part of the country?
... Localized entirely within your kitchen?
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.
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.
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...
There is irony here that does not sleep.
And given the whole premise of the piece is “this should not be here!” I don’t really understand the point you’re making. The author says it’s a strange find in that area - so either they have a valid point or they don’t.
I don’t know if it’s a fossil. It doesn’t look like a fossil to me. I’m not a fossil expert. The only way to tell if it is a fossil is to do some analysis on the actual specimen before writing screeds about what it might or might not be based on visual similarity.
It's visibly very clearly a fossilized sea shell. You are being a useless pedant about the author's choice of verbiage.
Remember, the same author says "I found a seashell in the middle of the desert!" "shouldn't be here" and "coastline 500 miles"
And that analysis finds out that the shell the assumed fossil most resembles is completely out of period.
And I think you’re arguing yourself into a hole here.
What makes you think I know nothing about the topic? I have donated - at their request - three fossils to national museums.
But I’m not an expert by any stretch.