Ammonites are a tale of two textures. The prehistoric cephalopods were composed of fleshy soft tissue (the living bit of the animals) and hard external shells, which, according to a paper published ...

The bizarre fossil is one of very few records of soft tissue in a creature better known as a whorled shell. By Sabrina Imbler If anxious humans have nightmares of being naked in public, an anxious ...

Some extinct species left copious fossil remnants of their existence. Ammonites—an extinct type of cephalopod—are one such example. From the Devonian right up until the Paleocene, wherever ancient ...

Ammonites are a group of fossil marine mollusk animals closely related to living cephalopods (i.e., octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish) and shelled nautiloids such as the living Nautilus species. The ...

Ninety-nine million years ago in what's now Myanmar, a glob of tree resin oozed onto a beach. Today, the resulting fossilized lump of amber is giving scientists an astonishing glimpse into life on a ...

Robotic ammonites, evaluated in a university pool, allow researchers to explore questions about how shell shapes affected swimming ability. They found trade-offs between stability in the water and ...

Earth once hosted more than 10,000 species of these ancient marine predators. Find out how they lived, when they vanished, and how much we know about them today. Based on the fossil record, ammonites ...

In a university swimming pool, scientists and their underwater cameras watch carefully as a coiled shell is released from a pair of metal tongs. The shell begins to move under its own power, giving ...