OK, let’s talk about what happens when you get an unholy alliance of octopus and snail — an armored mollusk with tentacles. And how about letting them get large? How about some species with shells two meters in diameter.
So here’s a little bit about ammonites, a marine mollusk with a long history — from the Devonian to the Cretaceous before they went extinct at roughly the same time as the dinosaurs.
Wikipedia Link
The main fossil remnant of Ammonites are their shells since the soft parts are rarely preserved. The shape, sutures, and spiraling of the shells of the various genera of ammonites allows them to be used as an index fossil to help identify the age and probable marine environment of deposits.
Link to Courtenay Museum web site
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Fine and dandy for a museum to have these. Can we find them ourselves? The answer is “Yes”.
Well, there are some complexities involved. You need to find the rocks of the right period and an environment where the ammonites would be living and then buried and potentially preserved.
(In the exposure above there is a 5” band of shale in which some low-grade ammonite fossils can be founds.)
* — Not that exciting, eh? But this is an impression from something that lived more than 85 million years ago.
The museum in Courtenay had an entire display case of ammonite remains from Hornby Island, BC. And it just so happened that we had visited one of those locales on the previous day. In this instance the fossils are found in a mudstone formation.
Fossils pictured below are not necessarily ammonites since we were finding fossils of other creatures as well. (I personally was busy photographing bald eagles and sand crabs.)
The last photo is a shell piece of the ammonite variety below that was pictured in the same diorama as the title picture.
And finally, some impressions of clams in a shale in a locale in Brown’s River near Courtenay.
Fossils are out there to be looked at in situ in addition to being seen in museums. Odds are that there are local museums or other groups that have paleontologists and sponsor field trips to look at locales and potentially collect fossils. And such groups may be getting permission to look on private property and locations like quarries that would otherwise be unavailable to someone out looking on their own.
And one thing I was happy to see when visiting the museum in Courtenay was that there was an elementary school group there. And we saw their bus a few hours later parked beside a highway bridge that we had been told was one of the nearby fossil locales. So some children are getting this added to their education.
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Now It's Your Turn
What have you noted happening in your area or travels? As usual post your observations as well as their general location in the comments.