"People love seashells, and once they begin to understand what’s happening to them they begin to care."
Where to begin when you set out to write the epic story of a marine species that has survived a half-billion-year test of time, was held sacred by ancient people who dwelled in the high Andes, helped finance the African slave trade and is an increasingly threatened source of life-sustaining nutrition for millions across the globe?
Cynthia Barnett wanted to begin at the very beginning. And by a happy coincidence that meant spending time at the Florida Museum of Natural History, just a mile from her Gainesville home.
UF’s museum has come into possession of what is said to be the world’s largest seashell collection, compliments of its donor, Florida physician Harry Lee. And Barnett joined Lee at the museum for microscopic examinations of 3-million-year-old fossil micro-mollusks.
Read more at the Gainesville Sun