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Suppafly 6 minutes ago [-]
Cool write up, a little weird that you were surprised to find it in the first place though.
purplehat_ 3 hours ago [-]
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!
altcognito 2 hours ago [-]
I'm a little confused about how significant of information can be derived from a 2d projection of the shell. This sort of mathematical modeling looks like phrenology.
drzaiusx11 2 hours ago [-]
Using PCA on 3d shapes is a proven method for identification. It's nothing like phrenology aside from both involving morphology. Former actually works, latter does not.
altcognito 49 minutes ago [-]
(I upvoted, seems a little weird that you were downvoted) So, I spent a little time looking up "Principal Component Analysis" and yeah, this method works well with these forms, and my comment comparing it to phrenology was definitely more out of ignorance!
I was most surprised that you could flatten a 3d structure in a 3d way 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)
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.
andix 1 hours ago [-]
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.
thrownthatway 59 minutes ago [-]
Was the land lower, the seas higher, or some combination, way back when?
andix 22 minutes ago [-]
I'm not sure, I would guess both.
HiPhish 2 hours ago [-]
Are you sure that's a fossil and not just a rook that happens to look kinda like a snail's shell?
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"
tokai 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe some geology buffs can correct me, but as I understand it there has been three periods with ocean on top of the crust we call Pakistan today. The Proto-Tethys, Paleo-Tethys, and Tethys Ocean. Many hundreds of millions of years of being ocean.
colechristensen 3 hours ago [-]
Because of the Indian subcontinent colliding with the Eurasian plate there's a wide variety of origins for the surface geology in that region.
Herodotus did it first, and even speculated that that region must have been covered by water at some point.
saaaaaam 4 hours ago [-]
“A brief tale of how I got AI psychosis after I mistook pareidolia for a fossil”
I’m more interested in the giant face carved into the rocks in the second photo. Does this person not realise they’ve discovered a previously unknown sculpture of Yahoo-Wahoo?
colechristensen 3 hours ago [-]
Huh? Plenty of places have geology where the rocks were formed under ancient oceans and are full of sea fossils.
saaaaaam 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe. But I don’t see anything in this piece that says that it’s a fossil, rather than something that resembles this person’s idea of a fossil. It doesn’t look like a fossil to me. It looks like a piece of rock that’s been bashed about a bit.
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.
throw1234567891 2 hours ago [-]
It says right there it’s a seashell hard as a rock. Guess why, Sherlock.
saaaaaam 57 minutes ago [-]
No it doesn’t. It says “ I found a fully solid rock that eerily resembles a seashell”.
throw1234567891 46 minutes ago [-]
Well, it's your words against his. You're not much of an expert by your own account in other comments. It's irrelevant if it's from a correct geological period, it's a rock hard seashell. Go and read up the definition of "fossil".
margalabargala 46 minutes ago [-]
To be clear, you are looking at the photographs in the linked article, and asserting that you think it's not a fossil?
It's visibly very clearly a fossilized sea shell. You are being a useless pedant about the author's choice of verbiage.
53 minutes ago [-]
tokai 3 hours ago [-]
Author points out themselves, in the second paragraph, that its not a strange find. The strangeness of the find is his personal experience. Not that its a strange find geologically.
saaaaaam 55 minutes ago [-]
And then the author takes a massive leap from “I found a fully solid rock that eerily resembles a seashell” to doing an analysis that treats it as though it actually is a fossil.
And that analysis finds out that the shell the assumed fossil most resembles is completely out of period.
oh_my_goodness 2 hours ago [-]
I agree it's not a strange find. Because fossils. But then what was the big deal about finding it?
Remember, the same author says "I found a seashell in the middle of the desert!" "shouldn't be here" and "coastline 500 miles"
colechristensen 3 hours ago [-]
If we're going to rate annoying takes on the internet, "some guy who knows nothing about a topic being snarky because AI was involved" is far worse than somebody doing something with AI.
saaaaaam 3 hours ago [-]
Guy?
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.
MattRix 3 hours ago [-]
It’s obvious you’re not an expert at the topic because we can all read the original article and then read your posts in this thread…
saaaaaam 53 minutes ago [-]
I’m really not sure what you mean. Did you actually read the article? There is nothing in there that confirms this is a fossil. One moment the author says “I found a fully solid rock that eerily resembles a seashell” and the next minute they treat it as though it is a fossil but their analysis shows that the shell the piece of rock most resembles is from a completely different geological period.
Cockbrand 4 hours ago [-]
She sells seashells in the Sahara was my first association, but then the article clearly states that we're talking about a different desert.
throw310822 3 hours ago [-]
Looks like ampullospira, documented in Saudi Arabia. Age (middle-upper Jurassic) and actual location also match.
TheMagicHorsey 1 hours ago [-]
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.
paulpauper 2 hours ago [-]
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.
analogpixel 4 hours ago [-]
I guess He didn't see the Reddit post in R/SaudiArabianDesertLostandFound
> "if anyone finds my lucky seashell that I lost, could you please return it. I think I lost it near the Alghat desert while I was sledding down a sand dune.
3 hours ago [-]
muenalan 4 hours ago [-]
land snails ?
cluckindan 2 hours ago [-]
In the middle of a desert?
the__alchemist 1 hours ago [-]
Where does the water come from?
[;)]
2 hours ago [-]
d--b 3 hours ago [-]
Snails have shells too. Just saying
croisillon 4 hours ago [-]
couldn't it be a snail?
5 hours ago [-]
markdown 4 hours ago [-]
What a ridiculous place to put a blog. Why is this on github?
mik3y 4 hours ago [-]
Because the repo includes the tool authored for, and discussed in, the "blog"?
Not saying its a good idea, but blogging on github has been a thing for much over a decade by now.
charcircuit 5 hours ago [-]
I don't understand why the author didn't put all of these pictures and information of where he found it into an AI like ChatGPT. That should be the first thing one should try.
tomstuart 4 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
how is it depressing? that seems a tad strong. Maybe disappointment is the correct feeling
orf 4 hours ago [-]
Why? Calling a reasonable thing grim without any follow-up isn’t the hallmark of a good comment either.
bigstrat2003 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
Azantys 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe he's not an idiot?
saaaaaam 4 hours ago [-]
Who says the whole analysis isn’t AI inspired?
sublinear 4 hours ago [-]
Is this example of vector search not "AI" enough?
addandsubtract 3 hours ago [-]
GenAI is the new AI, now, unfortunately. PapersWithCode died for this.
sam_goody 4 hours ago [-]
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...
throw310822 3 hours ago [-]
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.
CamperBob2 4 hours ago [-]
The AI would confidently give him the wrong answer
There is irony here that does not sleep.
paradoxyl 4 hours ago [-]
When a coder does it, it matters and must be posted on HN. Get off yourself.
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 in a 3d way 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)
https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/94685v1/pdf
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.
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.
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...
I’m more interested in the giant face carved into the rocks in the second photo. Does this person not realise they’ve discovered a previously unknown sculpture of Yahoo-Wahoo?
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.
And that analysis finds out that the shell the assumed fossil most resembles is completely out of period.
Remember, the same author says "I found a seashell in the middle of the desert!" "shouldn't be here" and "coastline 500 miles"
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.
This should allay fears that AI will render people jobless or automate everything.
> "if anyone finds my lucky seashell that I lost, could you please return it. I think I lost it near the Alghat desert while I was sledding down a sand dune.
[;)]
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.