I loved some of the things Fractal Kitty rounded up, especially Hawzen's amazing effort to identify a fossil mollusc shell purely on the basis of gross morphology, here. I kinda sorta understand the maths, though not in any great detail, especially this:
Naturally, the distance between two shells s1 and s2 is squared euclidean distance between their contour points:
Naturally!
Is it the species they think it is? Who cares.

