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 ...

Unlike those examples, however, ammonites had protective outer shells – and those shells didn't maintain one consistent shape throughout the fossil record. Led by postdoctoral fellow David Peterman ...

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 ...

These extinct shelled cephalopods ruled the ocean for 300 million years. But how they swam and shaped the seas remains a mystery. "Snake stones" or ancient sea creature? Credit: opacity/flickr/CC ...

For over 300 million years, the ammonites ruled the prehistoric seas. Finding an ammonite fossil isn’t particularly rare (they can be unearthed all over the world) but they’re still thrilling to ...

Ammonites are among the most common marine fossils from the age of the dinosaurs, but no one has found one like this before. It shows one of the swimming marine molluscs without its distinctive spiral ...

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 ...