![]() Browse the pages of Leonardo's notebooks, full of coiling fossil shells and his own sketched whorls, and count me with the believers. The evidence that a shell-inspired Leonardo da Vinci designed the left-handed spiral staircase at France's Château de Blois divides architectural believers and skeptics to this day. They patterned the ammonites, fossil mollusks long vanished, but close enough to the living nautilus that they emboldened scientists in the same era to think about evolution and geologic change. They shaped the shells of tiny foraminifera, some of the first marine microfossils studied in microscopes in the seventeenth century. ![]() Each graceful coil is wider than the next by a constant factor, making a nautilus shell one of the most recognizable spirals in nature. Spiral seashells evoke galaxies because of their logarithmic pattern of growth, best seen in a cross section of the Chambered Nautilus. ![]()
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