With some ingenuity and imagination, any item can be worn and flaunted as jewellery. Including fossils, not the type housed in glass inside museums, but living ones. One such fossil came from the sea. If you haven't been into either jewellery or sea shells, you might be surprised at the sight of nautilus shells for jewellery.

Shells all many kinds and sizes have been used as keepsakes, attached at the end of key chains, framed as mementos of a beach trip, and even used a centrepieces. On the utilitarian side, they've been used as containers for water. Sometimes as ashtrays. But jewellery? Yes. Ranging from small to big, or small enough to be used earrings and pendants, and big enough to be the size of your toaster, nautilus shells have found their way as works of art.

Coiled in a spiral and housing several chambers, the nautilus shells is said to be
a product of evolutionary engineering. Its chambers, which serve as balancing mechanisms, are all mathematically proportional to each other. Not only that, shells no different from the current nautilus variety have been found in fossilized materials from as far back as five million years ago. Nautilus shells are carnivorous, and their beautiful spiral shape and size naturally lends them to appreciate as jewellery.

When you go online, you can search for nautilus shells sold as jewellery. When you visit south-east Asian countries like the Philippines and Polynesia, you will find the inhabitants living near the beaches either selling nautilus sea shells, or selling adornments made with them. In more expensive settings, you can even find nautilus shells framed by expensive and precious stones, or ornamented with other materials, reincarnated from their sea shell form to one that can find them flaunted as pendants and earrings.