Del océano al verso. Las caracolas de Pablo Neruda

A Surprising and Interesting Seashell Collection Gathered by a Great Poet Professor Cecilia Osorio 1 M olluscs are magnificent, generous animals, and from their beginnings deeply connected to the life of human beings. Their shells are structures that both protect them and change as the molluscs develop, reproduce and die. They are a testimony of their existence, a voice that allows us to discover traces of different stages of their vital cycle. In the shapes, details and ornamentation of their surface one can observe creases, canals, sutures, lamellas, points, tubes, bulges, rings and other details where it's possible to read between the lines about how they adapted to the medium in which they lived. Also, their magnificent colors, of different intensities, speak about their lives. The meaning of the extraordinary beauty and ornaments of these seashells was grasped by Neruda’s exquisite sensibility. His writings reflected [1] Cecilia Osorio Ruiz (1939- ) studied Pedagogy in Biology and Chemistry in the Facultad de Educación. Then she started teaching in the Departamento de Ciencias Ecológicas of Universidad de Chile’s Facultad de Ciencias and then became a member of the Centro de Investigaciones Zoológicas in the same university. She has directed the Malacological Collection of the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural and worked in several institutions in Chile and Europe. During the eighties and nineties she took parto of important expeditions to Saint Paul and Amsterdam Islands in the Indian Ocean, to Robinson Crusoe Island, to the Chilean Antarctica and the fiords of southern Chile directed by Marseille University, the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural de Chile, the Raleigh Expedition and the British Museum (Natural History) in London. She has published more than one hundred scientific articles in national and international magazines and, among her books, we can mention: Moluscos Marinos de Importancia Económica de Chile (2002), Las Caracolas de Pablo Neruda (2006) and Moluscos de Rapa Nui (2023). 24 universidad de chile