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One of my favorite object at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: a Greek marble shell, ca. 400 B.C.E.
This work imitates a pelican's foot shell, which is common to the Mediterranean. Only a handful of marble shells are known. They must have been manufactured in the same Greek workshops that produced elegant marble vessels intended as grave offerings for the dead.
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English shell box, ca. 19th century.
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Louis Daguerre: Shells and Fossils, 1839.
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Al Jarnow's stop-motion "Seashells" for Sesame Street, ca. 1985.
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AND then I pressed the shell
Close to my ear
And listened well,
And straightway like a bell
Came low and clear
The slow, sad murmur of the distant seas ...
