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 ...

The bizarre fossil is one of very few records of soft tissue in a creature better known as a whorled shell. By Sabrina Imbler If anxious humans have nightmares of being naked in public, an anxious ...

Some fossils of long-extinct sea creatures display brilliant rainbow colors. Known as ammolite, these gems come from the fossilized shells of ammonites, squid-like marine animals that vanished with ...

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 ...

Ninety-nine million years ago in what's now Myanmar, a glob of tree resin oozed onto a beach. Today, the resulting fossilized lump of amber is giving scientists an astonishing glimpse into life on a ...

Amber can be a veritable treasure trove of ancient animals and insects, but it most commonly captures creatures that lived in forests – understandable, given the stuff starts life as tree sap. But now ...

Opalized ammonite fossils are some of the most unique and spectacular paleontological specimens. They were formed through a ...

Scientists devised a mathematic model that helps explains how Nipponites, some of the wonkiest ammonites, built their shells. By Sabrina Imbler If you’ve seen one ammonite, you may think you’ve seen ...

For a little while, Mosasaurus maximus was my labmate. The sharp-toothed marine predator was an inoffensive neighbor, though – no doubt because only the fossilized bones, coated in beeswax to stop the ...

Ammonites are a group of fossil marine mollusk animals closely related to living cephalopods (i.e., octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish) and shelled nautiloids such as the living Nautilus species. The ...