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This project explores computational shell morphology through mathematical growth models, procedural geometry and quantitative morphological analysis.
The work began following a visit to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and an observation that many shell forms appear to emerge from variations on a surprisingly small set of underlying geometric principles.
Mollusc shells illustrate beautifully how diversity can arise from just a few variations on one simple mathematical model, encoded in the genes.
The project investigates that idea through a series of computational experiments. Starting from a common growth framework, a wide range of shell forms can be generated by varying parameters governing growth, coiling, aperture geometry, ornamentation and internal shell structure.
Although highly simplified, the resulting models reproduce many recognisable features of real molluscan and cephalopod shells, including chambered nautilus-like forms, ammonite-inspired shells, orthocones, cyrtocones and high-spired gastropods.
The emphasis is not on producing biologically exact simulations. Instead, the project explores how complex and recognisably natural forms can emerge from the interaction of relatively simple developmental rules.
In this sense, the models can be viewed as small experiments in computational natural history. They sit somewhere between mathematical visualisation, procedural modelling and developmental morphology, using code not only to generate shell forms but also to classify, compare and analyse them within a common computational framework.
The project currently comprises four complementary components:
- Growth Mathematics – mathematical descriptions of shell growth, including logarithmic spiral and centreline-based geometries.
- Procedural Geometry – construction of shell meshes, internal chambers, siphuncles and surface ornamentation from the underlying growth models.
- Computational Taxonomy – a consistent classification system describing the biological inspiration, computational geometry and observable morphology of each shell.
- Morphological Analysis – metadata-driven comparison of shell forms using similarity matrices and hierarchical clustering to explore relationships within the computational morphospace.
Together these components provide a framework for investigating shell morphology computationally, from the underlying mathematics of growth through to quantitative comparison of the resulting forms.
The chapters that follow document each stage of this process, covering the mathematical foundations, implementation, shell construction techniques, computational taxonomy, morphological analysis and the example shell morphologies developed throughout the project.