Dear Cephalopod Enthusiasts,
first of all, please forgive me if this hasn't been posted in the right forum - it didn't seem to fit in anywhere, so I chose "Physiology and Biology" (Mods, please feel free to move this anywhere you think appropriate!).
I'm a big fan of Danna Staaf's book "Squid Empire", which I have recently read another time. She gives a truly enthralling view of the cephalopod history ... but I'm not writing an advertisement.
While re-reading the book another time, however, a question kept nagging at me: on what grounds are we so sure that ammonites no longer exist today? I confess that I'm an ammonite lover and this is probably just borne of wishful thinking but if anybody could spend some time to shed more light on this, this would be much appreciated, indeed!
For instance, in the "Study of Deep-Sea Cephalopods" by Hoving et al. (Adv.Mar.Biol. 2014; 67:235-359), we read that only "[...] less than 0.0001% of the deep-sea flor have been investigated." I know that shelled cephalopods couldn't go deep but seeing that e.g. baculites seem to have thrived around methane seeps, why is everybody so sure that there won't be some kinds of ammonites left around some methane seep or in any other obscure habitat somewhere in these unexplored vast reaches? Maybe for some reason the shells of these animals don't drift long ranges, we wouldn't know they are there, would we?
I know that the fossil record of ammonites breaks off waaay in the past. However, the fossil record of the coelacanthiformes breaks off 70 mil. years ago, everybody considered them extinct, but we know since the 90s that they are still present in our oceans today.
So, considering that (a) we know next to nothing about the greater part of the oceans and (b) some species have survived to the present day even when their fossil record breaks off, what makes everybody so 100% sure that this might not be the case with ammonites, too? Maybe this is all very obvious and I just don’t get it, but I’m really wondering…
Thank you for taking the time to read all this and best wishes from a lover of the head-footed,
Stefan Hümmerich
first of all, please forgive me if this hasn't been posted in the right forum - it didn't seem to fit in anywhere, so I chose "Physiology and Biology" (Mods, please feel free to move this anywhere you think appropriate!).
I'm a big fan of Danna Staaf's book "Squid Empire", which I have recently read another time. She gives a truly enthralling view of the cephalopod history ... but I'm not writing an advertisement.
While re-reading the book another time, however, a question kept nagging at me: on what grounds are we so sure that ammonites no longer exist today? I confess that I'm an ammonite lover and this is probably just borne of wishful thinking but if anybody could spend some time to shed more light on this, this would be much appreciated, indeed!
For instance, in the "Study of Deep-Sea Cephalopods" by Hoving et al. (Adv.Mar.Biol. 2014; 67:235-359), we read that only "[...] less than 0.0001% of the deep-sea flor have been investigated." I know that shelled cephalopods couldn't go deep but seeing that e.g. baculites seem to have thrived around methane seeps, why is everybody so sure that there won't be some kinds of ammonites left around some methane seep or in any other obscure habitat somewhere in these unexplored vast reaches? Maybe for some reason the shells of these animals don't drift long ranges, we wouldn't know they are there, would we?
I know that the fossil record of ammonites breaks off waaay in the past. However, the fossil record of the coelacanthiformes breaks off 70 mil. years ago, everybody considered them extinct, but we know since the 90s that they are still present in our oceans today.
So, considering that (a) we know next to nothing about the greater part of the oceans and (b) some species have survived to the present day even when their fossil record breaks off, what makes everybody so 100% sure that this might not be the case with ammonites, too? Maybe this is all very obvious and I just don’t get it, but I’m really wondering…
Thank you for taking the time to read all this and best wishes from a lover of the head-footed,
Stefan Hümmerich