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 ...

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 last supper of an ammonite, a shelled cephalopod relative of squid and octopus, was stuck in the individual's mouth when it died, described in a new study published in the journal Science.

Ammonites were spiral-shelled marine mollusks that drifted throughout the Mesozoic seas until the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction event. Despite how abundant they are in the fossil record, we don ...

Rachael has a degree in Zoology from the University of Southampton, and specializes in animal behavior, evolution, palaeontology, and the environment. Rachael has a degree in Zoology from the ...

Learn how egg size may help explain why ammonites didn’t survive the end-Cretaceous extinction 66 million years ago, while their relatives, the nautiloids, did. Life in the ancient oceans wasn’t easy, ...

Researchers have revealed the soft tissues of a 165-million-year-old ammonite fossil using 3D imaging. They found that the now-extinct molluscs sported hyponomes: tube-like syphons through which water ...

If you’ve ever been in a shop that sells fossils — the natural history museum gift shop, the nature store in the mall, and so on — you’ve probably seen an ammonite. Its chambered coils make a distinct ...

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 ...