Mother-of-pearl is the hard, silvery, internal layer of several kinds of shells, especially oysters, the large varieties of which in the Indian Seas secrete this coat of sufficient thickness to ...

To protect itself from the invader, the mollusk starts to coat the debris with nacre, or mother-of-pearl, the same material that lines the inner layer of its shell. It continues doing this ...

In Egypt, decorative mother-of-pearl was used at least as far back as 4200 B.C., but the use of pearls themselves seems to have been later, perhaps related to the Persian conquest in the fifth ...

By secreting layers of aragonite and conchiolin, the same substances that are in its calcium carbonate shell, the mollusc creates a material called nacre, commonly known as mother-of-pearl. The oyster ...