Ammonites 101

Hello comrades! Today's post will be about ammonites.
        I was planning to make this post about one specific species of ammonite, but there were just so many different kinds, that I thought it would be more interesting to talk about the entire order of ammonites and their fascinating multiformity. First of all, ammonites are obviously not dinosaurs, so this goes under that whole "things" category. They are a specific order of aquatic animals belonging to the phylum mollusca, the same one that including squid and snails. They were common throughout the Mesozoic Era, the same time as the dinosaurs. The whole order went extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs as well. Their closest living relative today is the nautilus, which looks similar to how many scientists today think an ammonite would have looked in life.
        Ammonites came in a surprisingly diverse variety of shapes and sizes. The most famous of these shapes being the coiled spiral or "evolute serpenticone." There are technical terms to describe pretty much every conceivable variation of this shape, so a guide is included below.

       Ammonites could be enormous or incredibly small depending on the species. Serpenticone's like Promicroceras were only 1.5 cm across, whereas others like Parapuzosia were 2.6 meters across! These are always just the shells that are found as fossils. The soft bodied parts obviously could not survive the fossilization process. The shells were composed of aragonite and so are quite durable. Ammonites would've eaten small prey like minnows and isopods, which are small swimming crustaceans. Depending on the thickness of their shells they could have swam to all sorts of different depths.

       That's that for ammonites. The next post will be on some kind of dinosaur.

-Athos

Monks, Neale, and Philip Palmer. Ammonites. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2002. Print.

Nasutuceratops Titusi

        Hey guys, today's post is about the recently discovered Nasutuceratops!

        Nasutuceratops was a Late Cretaceous dinosaur belonging to the family ceratopsidae, the same family as the famous Triceratops. The animal was about 4 meters long, 1.5 meters tall, and a ton in weight. It was discovered in Utah, which was, during the Cretaceous period, an enormous area of swamp land. This ceratopsid made a bit of a stir in the media thanks to its unusual name, which translates from latin to mean "Big nose horned face." However it is not the dinosaur's nose that is most peculiar, many other members of this family such as Pachyrhinosaurus had similar large sets of nares. It is the horns that make Nasutuceratops unique. Here's a comparison with Triceratops, see if you can spot it.

I drew those arrows myself. I'm so talented.

        It's the horns. Nasutuceratops had horns that, unlike the rest of its family, stuck horizontally down its face. These horns are confusing, since unlike other ceratopsids, they could not use them as self defense. On Triceratops, for example, the horns are pointing up, so if there was a large predator like a Tyrannosaurus, it would be able to thrust out its head and gore the enemy. Nasutuceratops' horns are not at an angle that would allow it to gore anything, and even if it tried to attack something lower down, its beak would get in the way. In my opinion, Nasutuceratops' genus probably evolved to have more head butting contests than its evolutionary siblings, contests in which large forward pointing horns could be broken or damaged. These flatter-to-the-face horns would also help to cushion blows when ramming each other. In this manner, they would be more like a Pachycephalosaurus in their mating and territorial disputes, rather than the rutting behavior scientists believe other members of ceratopsidae would have engaged in.

    (click to enlarge)

   And that about wraps up today's entry. Next time it will probably be an ammonite or something. I haven't done one of them yet.

-Athos

For this one:

http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm/ref/collection/etd3/id/528