![]() ![]() Animals that scurry across the ocean floor, burrow down into sand, climb up rocks, turn corners, and flip somersaults. They are animals with rapacious tongues and rows of teeth to feed big, wolf-hungry stomachs. Others have a hundred electric blue eyes, set in dazzling rows. Indeed, some mollusks have two retractable eyes, mounted at the tip of curious tentacles, that seem to follow you like the Mona Lisa. ![]() Yet appreciating seashells apart from the life that evolved to build them is like appreciating Leonardo for his notebook sketches while overlooking his living, breathing paintings. Seashells were models for the original minaret, the protective portico, the scalloped edge, and countless other iconic forms now moved from sea to skyline: Antoni Gaudí's vaulted rooftops in Catalonia Frank Lloyd Wright's spiraling Guggenheim Museum in New York and Jørn Utzon's Sydney Opera House in Australia, the waterfront beauty for which Utzon credits the fierce- looking cockscomb oyster, Lopha cristagalli. ![]()
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