If anxious humans have nightmares of being naked in public, an anxious ammonite may have dreamed about swimming around without its shell, its soft body exposed to the elements and the leering eyes of predators.
For one unfortunate ammonite in the Late Jurassic, this was no dream but a harsh reality. The animal died utterly unclad, outside its whorled shell, and was buried this way. According to a study published recently in the Swiss Journal of Palaeontology, the ammonite’s death made it an extraordinary fossil — one of very few records of soft tissue in a creature that is most often immortalized as a shell.
“We know millions and millions of ammonites that have been preserved from their shell, so something exceptional had to happen here,” said Thomas Clements, a paleobiologist at the University of Birmingham in England who was not involved with the research. “It’s like finding ——” Dr. Clements said, trailing off. “Well, I don’t even know what it’s like finding, it’s that bizarre.”
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