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Who says the whole analysis isn’t AI inspired?
Is this example of vector search not "AI" enough?
Because it’s much more fun that way
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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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Not saying its a good idea, but blogging on github has been a thing for much over a decade by now.
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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"

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.
Maybe a nitpick but Latamber is not directly north of Karachi and it's about 1000 kilometers away (the closest coast is 950 km but not in Karachi). It's easy to see and to measure on a map.
Looks like ampullospira, documented in Saudi Arabia. Age (middle-upper Jurassic) and actual location also match.
Snails have shells too. Just saying
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!

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.

Herodotus did it first, and even speculated that that region must have been covered by water at some point.
Are you sure that's a fossil and not just a rook that happens to look kinda like a snail's shell?
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.
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.

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.

Cool write up, a little weird that you were surprised to find it in the first place though.
"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

Very interesting story and also hands-on walkthrough of PCA.
I found may under 12feet in desert of Thar, India.

It was River or flood deposited according to my research.

Awesome, someone finally found one of the seashells I drop for entertainment when I go for a ride across the desert
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