Andrew Vik
Tampa, Fl., USA
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John:

That reminds me of another pseudo-shell that had me fooled. About ten years ago,
I started taking samples of  beach drift in search of micro-shells. One object
that I found was a small, pink limpet about one centimeter in diameter  with a
rough textured outer surface. I could find no reference to this creature in any
mollusc book, so I began to theorize as to what non-mollusc group it could
belong to. I came to the conclusion that it was the sieve plate from a large
starfish. A few years later, while looking through a generalized fossil book, my
mystery species leapt off the page. It was neither mollusk nor echinoderm, but a
bryozoan (sorry, my library is packed away for my impending relocation, and I
can't state the genus or order from memory). And while browsing further in that
same fossil book, I saw a fossil ostracod crustacean that looked exactly like
one of the "lepton clams" that I had sorted from the same samples. I guess it
pays to read as much as you can because you never know what you will find out. I
don't collect fossils, but I value the insights they give into modern forms. I
take it that your pistachio was plain-hulled, not the typical red-dyed variety.
That would have been a dead give away.

Andrew

Cramer, John wrote:

> Glen's story about the okra pod that looked like a snail shell reminds me of
> one of my foolish moments.  We had collected some 25 species of Eocene
> gastropod fossils from an Alabama roadcut site.  I was sorting them at home
> and, as usual, had a group of shells I couldn't quickly identify.  I went
> through these, looking through my books and kept coming back to what looked
> like a small slipper shell but no ID. Well, I made several attempts to ID
> the thing and then something clicked somewhere and I realized I was looking
> at half of very modern pistachio shell.  Talk about feeling stupid!