Acoustical scattering from spherical shells has been studied extensively in the literature and is a highly developed and well‐understood area. In contrast, scattering from nonspherical, three‐dimensional objects has not been studied extensively due to theoretical and computational difficulties. The purpose of the work presented here is to study backscattered echoes (form functions) from submerged spheroidal elastic shells for end‐on incident plane waves for several aspect ratiosL/Dand to compare the results with the well‐studied spherical analog (Lis the length andDthe width of the object). The frequency range studied in terms ofkL/2 (wherekis the wavenumber of the incident field) goes fromkL/2=3 tokL/2=15 and the aspect ratio varies from 1.5 to 3.0. Two values for shell thickness studied are for 0.1% and 1.0% of the semimajor axis, with the constraint that the inner surface of the shell is spheroidal. A remarkable similarity is noted between the form functions of the spheroids and the shells. This correspondence can be shown to be deduced from phenomenological expressions (due to Werby and Gaunard, ‘‘Proceedings of the 1985 Pressure Vessels and Piping Conference,’’ New Orleans, LA, 23–26 June 1985) for resonance locations and offers a simple means to predict the locations of end‐on resonances for the more intractable problem of higher aspect ratio spheroids.