An ammonite’s final meal casts light on the group’s ecology
THIS picture shows an ammonite’s last meal. Ammonites, a group of squid-like animals that lived in buoyant, air-filled spiral shells, dominated the seas of the Mesozoic era. They died out, along with the dinosaurs and many other creatures, at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65m years ago, when the Earth was hit by an asteroid. The blue part of the image is an isopod—a small crustacean. The yellow is the remains of the ammonite’s teeth.
The photograph, published this week in Science, was taken by a group led by Isabelle Kruta of the French National Museum of Natural History, using a technique called synchrotron X-ray microtomography. This is able to see structures still embedded in the rock in which the ammonite was preserved. …
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