I recently got excited about the beauty of life and death and time as represented in skeletons, after finding the skull of a small mammal.

Happily, my recent fascination in these abandoned structures was indulged once again today upon finding a tortoise skeleton… Only it wasn’t completely abandoned — it had become a living community for other shelled creatures: snails!

What I found most striking, structurally, was how fragile the outer shell layer was. I was expecting a sort of hard enamel, a sort of marble solid covering affixed in one large piece — but its shell is attached in delicate, individual segments, more like human nail only coloured.

See all 5 pictures I took today on FlickR.