At IFLScience, we often like to talk about the Mantelpiece Of Dreams, a line-up of rare geological trinkets we’d like to ...

The origins of vivid colors within the gemstone ammolite—a rare type of brightly colored fossilized ammonite shell—are ...

Ammonites are a group of extinct cephalopod mollusks with ribbed spiral shells. They are exceptionally diverse and well known to fossil lovers. Researchers have developed the first biomechanical model ...

Instantly recognizable by their spiral shells, these ancient predators were relatives of modern squid and octopuses. Because ...

If you’ve ever been in a shop that sells fossils — the natural history museum gift shop, the nature store in the mall, and so on — you’ve probably seen an ammonite. Its chambered coils make a distinct ...

Robotic ammonites, evaluated in a university pool, allow researchers to explore questions about how shell shapes affected swimming ability. They found trade-offs between stability in the water and ...

Earth once hosted more than 10,000 species of these ancient marine predators. Find out how they lived, when they vanished, and how much we know about them today. Based on the fossil record, ammonites ...

Jack Wonfor (pictured) is among the fossil hunters on the Isle of Wight who found a 211-pound fossilized seashell. It’s a 115-million-year-old ammonite, best described as a “squid-like cephalopod ...

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 ...

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Ohio’s indigenous American Indian Hopewell culture, which dates from around AD 1 to 400, is the use of unusual raw materials that found their way into Ohio ...

Ammonites are among the most common marine fossils from the age of the dinosaurs, but no one has found one like this before. It shows one of the swimming marine molluscs without its distinctive spiral ...

The origins of vivid colours within the gemstone ammolite — a rare type of brightly coloured fossilised ammonite shell — are reported in research ...