Pretty shell of the day: Paua shell

[stephbg]

Today I was playing a little with the light box and picked up a paua shell more or less at random as a model. It made an improvement over the pair of scissors I started with. Anyway, here are some cropped and tinkered bits of shell. Heaven help us all should I actually acquire any proper photo manip software. Actually I do have an old Paint Shop Pro license kicking around so I might see how that runs on Win7.

Comments

[leecetheartist.livejournal.com]

Pretty abalone! Or paua. Same thing. The shell structure is interesting. It's a composite, calcium carbonate and some sort of protein sandwiched between it. So if something hits the shell, the sections of calcium carbonate slide instead of shattering.

I believe they're looking into using this sort of thing in body armour research.