Ammonite fossils from a nineteenth-century engraving.
“I remember when I was a kid taking paleontology, and I learned that
pterodactyls could fly,” Landman told me. “My immediate question was,
well, how high could they fly? And it’s hard to come up with those
numbers.”
“I’ve studied ammonites for forty years, and I’m still not sure exactly
what they liked,” he went on. “I feel they liked water twenty, thirty,
maybe forty meters deep. They were swimmers but not very good
swimmers. I think they lived a quiet existence.” In drawings, ammonites
are usually depicted as resembling squids that have been stuffed into snail
shells. Landman, however, has trouble with this depiction. He believes
that ammonites, though commonly shown with several streaming
tentacles, in fact had none. In a drawing that accompanies a recent
journal article he published in the journal Geobios, ammonites are shown
looking like little more than blobs. They have stubby armlike appendages,
which are arrayed in a circle and connected by a web of tissue. In males,
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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