Ammonite - Time Frozen Shell

Ammonite Shell - Bali, Indonesia

Recently I was reading my diary and watching all the photos we made on Bali, I think for the first time. And I found the image of this shell, and started wondering why does it have a Golden Ratio on it ?

This shell was home for ammonites - the animals who lived there and looked similar to octopus or squid.

Its iconic spiral wasn’t a decorative accident. It emerged from a perfect balance of engineering and evolution. As the animal grew, it expanded its “home” using a logarithmic principle: each chamber added to the edge, keeping proportions, shape, and stability unchanged. Pure isometric growth - millions of years before mathematics gave it a name.

Inside, the shell functioned like a natural submarine. Gas-filled chambers kept the creature neutrally buoyant, while the spiral geometry distributed pressure and prevented it from tipping over. Hydrodynamic, efficient, resilient.

It turns out that the spiral is one of the strongest shapes in nature - it allows animal to withstand tremendous pressure underwater.

In the end, only the forms that worked survived. Nature optimized the spiral because it offered everything at once: strength, stability, protection, and effortless growth. So nature calculates too.

But the mind-blowing part is this:

Ammonites died 65 - 400 million years ago, so imagine how strong this shell is...

When you hold an ammonite fossil in your hand, you are literally touching - a physical object that was alive million years ago.

The shell itself is original - but transformed into stone through fossilization (minerals replacing the organic material. You are holding a geological time capsule, a real piece of life from the age of dinosaurs. Very few objects you can touch in daily life are older than human civilization - but ammonites are hundreds of millions of years older.

Nature is indeed the main source of inspiration for me. Sometimes if we look for a solution, we might just look around - and it is already there.

(c) Nikita Ierisov

Keeper of Dharma Station