Though 70 percent of our planet is covered in water, we terrestrials still insist on calling it Earth. So much of the planet is under water that 4/5 of the life here is said to be aquatic. Much of it, as on dry land, is microscopic and unimaginably abundant, but of those life forms we can see, a whole group has evolved with an exoskeleton that has been collected and treasured for millennia.



The Precious Wentletrap is a species of predatory sea snail whose greatest distinction may be that it was counterfeited in porcelain and rice paste by the Chinese traders when such shells were worth a literal king's ransom to collectors in Europe. Today, the more fragile counterfeits are rare and fabulously expensive.