There were the iridescent shells of black abalone, the chalky shells of California Venus clams, and the sun-bleached shells of Pismo clams.
Some of the descriptions in his war diaries are among the best things he ever wrote: As I sit in the sun in a nook among the sandbags and chalky debris, with shells flying overhead in the blue air, a lark sings high up, and a little weasel comes and runs past me within a foot of my outstretched foot, looking at me with tiny bright eyes.
In the case of Lake Myvatn, a mining operation was started in 1967, scooping out part of the lake bottom for diatomite, a chalky white rock made of diatom shells and used for, among other purposes, filtering beer.
There is a tendency for the eggs to be ovoid (that is, with the ends equally rounded) and to have a white chalky outer layer, underneath which there may be a coloured shell.
Indents were made within the bulk, foliated layer of the shell, which was easily differentiated from the prismatic and chalky regions of the shell at low magnification.
The shell is almost translucent, and varies in color from a chalky pale yellow to white, with a glossy surface.
In most slugs, this remnant takes the form either of a small internal shell (a thin shelly plate), or a collection of calcareous (chalky) granules.
In other words, the shell plate in this species is oval in shape, solid, and chalky, with a transparent conchiolin (horny) base.
Clam shell from middens or the lakebed that was sampled in multiple ways (leached; chalky exterior shell; dense opalescent, unaltered inner shell) yielded generally concordant results.
The shell, which I sliced off with a knife to get into my egg, is made of chalky calcium carbonate, and it was added to my egg as it slipped down from the hen's oviduct into its shell gland or uterus.
