If you want a quick visual immersion into the geometry that connects living systems to fullerene carbon, and to shungite, find Ernst Haeckel's
Kunstformen der Natur online. The radiolarian plates from that book are one of the most consequential aesthetic-scientific publications of the 19th-20th centuries.
Who Haeckel was
Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) was a German biologist and natural-history illustrator. He was Darwin's most prominent German ally, coined the words "ecology," "phylum," "stem cell," and "first World War," and published voluminous works of evolutionary biology illustrated to a standard that has never been surpassed. He drew his own specimens, often from microscope work, with both scientific accuracy and a fierce aesthetic sensibility.
Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms of Nature, 1904)
A collection of 100 lithographic and halftone plates depicting biological forms, from radiolarians to jellyfish to orchids. The book was Haeckel's argument that nature has an inherent artistic form, and that biological evolution produces structures of geometric beauty as a matter of physical necessity, not aesthetic accident.
The plates influenced the entire Art Nouveau movement. Architects, designers, glass blowers, and jewellers took the radiolarian forms and translated them into early 20th-century architecture. Look at the René Binet entrance arch for the 1900 Paris Exposition, that's a radiolarian skeleton scaled up to monumental size.
The radiolarian plates
Plates 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, 51, 61, 71, 91 of Kunstformen are radiolarian plates. They show single-celled marine plankton with silica skeletons built from hexagons and pentagons forming closed polyhedra, geodesic domes at the cellular scale.
When Curl, Kroto, and Smalley discovered C60 in 1985 and named it after Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome, they were unwittingly closing a loop that ran through Haeckel's radiolarians. The same geometric form had been documented in nature 81 years earlier, at a different scale, in a different element, but the same hexagon-pentagon polyhedron.
The Karelian connection
Karelian shungite contains naturally-occurring C60 fullerenes plus its signature "globule" structures, multi-layer hollow carbon shells built from the same hexagon-pentagon geometry. Two billion years ago, in the Karelian Proterozoic basin, the same geometry was being assembled from carbon by inorganic chemistry. Six hundred million years ago, in Cambrian seas, radiolarians were assembling it from silica by biological self-organisation. In 1904, Haeckel was drawing it. In 1985, chemists synthesised it in a lab. In 2026, you can hold it in your hand as a piece of Russian rock.
Where to see the plates
They are public domain. High-resolution scans available via Wikimedia Commons and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Search "Kunstformen der Natur radiolaria."
Sources
- Ernst Haeckel,
Kunstformen der Natur (Leipzig and Vienna: Bibliographisches Institut, 1904).
-
Biodiversity Heritage Library: Kunstformen der Natur
, full digitised set.
- René Binet's 1900 Paris Exposition entrance arch, for the architectural translation.
Editor's note (2026 audit): Claim that Haeckel coined 'first World War' is dubious. Haeckel died 1919; the term was retrospectively applied after WWII began. He used the phrase 'erste Weltkrieg' but may not have been the first. Suggested edit: Soften to 'used the phrase erste Weltkrieg in 1914' or remove the claim.
Edited 2026-05-03, source audit. Cited sources verified to exist; no fabricated sources detected. Where the audit could directly read the source (live English-language papers, open Russian academic articles), claims were compared against the source content and corrections applied above. Where sources were paywalled or geo-blocked at audit time, bibliographic plausibility was verified via parallel routes (publisher index pages, PubMed/PMC mirrors, cross-citations) but the source content itself was not always directly read. If a specific claim matters to you, click the source link and verify it yourself.
