Heteromorph - The Book

www.Heteromorph.AtOne.org
The first edition of this book is now sold out. You may be able to find some used copies online. This page allows readers to explore the chapters and specimens featured in the book in more detail and to see some of the material from the 'cutting room floor' - those bits that did not make it into the book. There will also be a an expanding list of references and further re

ading once the book is published. Ammonites are the most common, and certainly the most popular, of fossils. They are found all over the world, on beaches and in road cuttings, wherever erosion takes place, either natural or man-made. They are the remains of extinct cephalopods whose descendants include today’s octopus, cuttlefish and squid. Ammonite fossils are increasingly moving out of traditional dusty museum cabinets into private homes, into the world of serious collectors, art and design. It is of course only the ammonites’ hard shells that are preserved as fossils. We conjecture that the soft parts of their bodies resembled their surviving relatives, such as the nautilus, although no fossilized soft parts of ammonites have yet been found. Ammonite shells range in size from smaller than a grain of sand to three meters in diameter and are often the first fossils that anyone collects. Their iconic spiral shape has inspired artists and architects since the dawn of human time. The presence of ammonites and their relatives in more than 400 million years of the history of life on Earth, and their tendency to evolve rapidly, has made their fossil remains a most effective way of measuring geological time. After jellyfish and echinoderms, the early ammonoids and nautiloids represented some of the first complex forms of life. A few of these early forms survived the Permian extinction 250 million years ago which destroyed 98% of all life on earth. Ammonites truly flourished in the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Ammonites dominated the sea before and during the time dinosaurs dominated the land. Some ammonites were large voracious predators not unlike today's giant squid; others small and delicate. While dinosaurs ruled the land, ammonites dominated the sea. Their evolutionary profusion made them powerful players in many marine ecological niches. Despite their diversity, ammonites died out at around the time of the massive meteor strike 65 million years ago on what is now the Yucatan peninsula in the western Caribbean. This extinction event that marked the end of the Cretaceous period also killed off the dinosaurs. Well, we now know that it killed off all but the small nimble and feathered ones – those we now call ‘birds’. No ammonites survived – at least none that we know of. The discovery of a coelacanth in the Indian Ocean millions of years after its supposed extinction showed that we can never be ‘sure’ of extinction. Three times during their 300 million year reign ammonites experimented with the most bizarre and startling shell shapes – resulting in ‘heteromorphs’. Simply put, heteromorph ammonites are bizarre. They are the visually different members of the prolific ammonite family. They do things that no ammonite should do. They depart from the well-known planispiral shape that is so iconic of ammonites. Their shapes are extremely varied and can seem impossibly distorted and chaotic, yet somehow disturbingly beautiful. It wasn’t until the tools used to extract and prepare ammonites became much more sophisticated in the 1980s and 1990s that the full characteristics of their odd shapes could be revealed. Their initial delicate whorls were discovered and a plethora of spines could be preserved for the first time. Soon specimens discovered in the USA, France and Japan were being displayed in all their glory, attracting collectors and investors alike. They made their way into fashionable art galleries and design emporia where they were sold alongside ethnic carvings and tribal art. Another aspect of nature became big business. The cover photo of this page shows an example of ‘nature turned into art’. Is it an assemblage constructed by a fossil preparator from many different finds? What exactly are we looking at here? It is in fact one complete rock matrix from which the outer layers have been removed molecule by molecule to expose a myriad of ammonites in situ, where they died and were fossilised, 120 million years ago. Of course this popularity and the demand for perfect specimens attracted the fakers. Morocco and Russia spawned industries that did such brilliant fakes of heteromorph ammonites and trilobites that for some this became a collecting theme in its own right

The surreal beauty of heteromorph ammonites enthralled collectors but also raised scientific questions about why evolution would go down such randomly creative paths and how these strange creatures might actually have lived. Surely their complex shell forms would almost preclude an animal from living successfully in this constantly morphing body chamber? Every time the shell changed from its planispiral shape, the animal would have to change its orientation within the shell, and likely its orientation in the water – perhaps even its lifestyle. At an academic level it was long postulated that heteromorphs’ crazy shapes were simply evolutionary oddities, that they represented stunted lineages that were doomed to failure and extinction. Now we know that their shapes are anything but random, that each heteromorph species displays a very definite and repeatable design - shapes that are likely encoded in very simple fractal formulae in their DNA. The immense variety of shapes and designs shows that these were vibrant and thriving species that together inhabited the marine world, in three major instalments, for more than one hundred million years – more than fifty times the timespan that humans have so far achieved. Darwin described the descent of all living organisms from a common ancestor as "endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful" - how perfectly this applies to heteromorph ammonites. "Endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful"
Charles Darwin