Freepath

gneiss
My sympathies. Talk about bubble gum in your hair. I need a drama enema after just reading that post.

Staying strong, living free

shockozulu

gneiss, sorry to hear about the family difficulties you are dealing with.

JenX, great to see another "SMARTie" here on Secular Connections.

OldManJudo, I'm glad you came to this thread. Welcome!

Zencat

OldManJudo and JenX to Secular Connections.

Off to the Psych Dr. today. Hoping to get something to help me with my anxiety otherwise I'm well enough to get the stuff I need done done, but just barely that .

californiapoppy

HI to you too !

californiapoppy

I certainly don't mean to offend but... I agree

californiapoppy

Maybe it's the road trip with "her" friend?

Bamboozle

Hey, gneiss. Sorry about your family problems. Rant as much as you need to.

How about a little distraction?

I bought this today and forgot to ask what it was. Is this an ammonite?

Bamboozle

californiapoppy

looks like an ammonite to me, but gneiss should know

gneiss

She doesn't know about it. Unless she's on SR, too.

gneiss

Ooooh!!! A short paleo lesson!!!! (Sorry, nerd at heart).

That's B-E-A-Utiful. It looks like the chambers have been filled in with quartz, specifically agate. Correct, it's an ammonoid. Or ammonite. Commonly the terms are sort of interchangeable. Strictly speaking ammonite is a specific type of ammonoid, and I think this one is an ammonite. There's a cousin of ammonoids still swimming around today, the chambered nautilus. A similar creature, presumably with a similar lifestyle. Much more distantly related are other cephalopods like octopi and squid.

Was the age of the fossil mentioned? Guessing from the sutures (those little swirly loopy patterns on the outside of the shell) I would say this critter lived in the Cretaceous, the last age of the dinosaurs. Whatever took out the dinosaurs also got ammonoids.

Ammonoids appeared about 450 million years ago with straight shells (up to 30 feet long) and less complex suture patterns; basically the sutures were straight lines, similar to the chambered nautilus. They rapidly (within about 30 to 50 million years) developed the familiar coil pattern. By the time they went extinct about 65 million years ago they had very complex sutures, which is what makes me think this one lived in the Cretaceous.

Thanks, Bam. That was fun.

Bamboozle

Thanks, gniess. I thought of you when I brought this thing home. I like it a lot. I might start collecting them.

Bamboozle

I was hoping you could tell me how old it is. Actually, I knew you could tell me how old it is.


I read that these things went with the dinos...and I thought that was curious. I don't know much about that period. I'll have to do some more info digging. Thanks again, gniess.

Dee74

awesome Bam

D

Zencat

Well that didn't go off as planned. I looked at my event calender this morning (as I do everyday and often throughout the day) and seen that my appointment was for 10:25. Then within a few minuets...somehow...I had it in my head my appointment was for 10:45. So I show up at the clinic at 10:35 only to be told by the receptionist my appointment was at 10:00. WTF!

So for the rest of the day I had the sad's. Crying on the drop of a dime...and for what I have no clue! another WTF! moment. On one hand I feel nothing (well kinda mellow) and yet on the other hand I tear up and break down for no apparent reason...at least to me. And then its boing! I'm feeling okay again. I see I'm in for a long night .

Dee74

I had a similar experience this week - turned up for an physio appointment that didn't exist.
Turns out it wasn't my fault - but it still threw me for the rest of the day.

Stick by the boards (((Zen)))

D

Zencat

Wow I just noticed these and way, way cool Bam.

Bamboozle

Hey, zencat.

About a month ago I went in for a therapy session that didn't exist. I was having a bad day and that put the icing on the crap cake. I found out that the receptionist who had scheduled me for an appointment my previous visit had put a different name down. I found my appointment card later and it didn't have my name on it. I never looked at it. I usually toss those things aside. I still don't understand how I lost my spot, but.......oh well. Now I look at my card and take it with me for proof.

gneiss

You're welcome. I had fun with it. Although, I asked Dr. Google for the first appearance of ammonoids. For the record, it was late Cambrian, somewhere around 450 to 500 million years ago. I'm not that good, I just have reference materials and a vague idea of where to start looking.

If my guess is correct, your fossil is somewhere between 65 million and 145 million years old (probably on the younger end of the scale, 65 to 75 million years). And it's beautiful!! Most of the ammonids you find look more like this one I found last summer in Colorado:

You can see the coil shape, but it's not nearly as nicely preserved as what Bam has. For scale reference, my rock hammer is about a foot long.

It actually makes a lot of sense that whatever killed the dinosaurs would also kill many other types of creatures. Whatever it was, to cause a mass extinction would have changed climates/environments worldwide in a major way and ecosystems would have broken down quickly. That was actually kind of small as mass extinctions go. For comparison: at the end of the Cretaceous (the end of the age of dinosaurs) around 60% of life went extinct. At the beginning of the age of dinosaurs, the end of the Permian/beginning of the Triassic, about 95% of life went extinct. Ammonoids survived the Permian-Triassic extinction but not the smaller Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction.

It seems reasonable, given findings in the last 10 years or so, that to some extent dinosaurs live on as birds. There have been a number of dinosaur skeletons found with skin and feathers preserved. The popular hypothesis of a major meteor impact has been called into question in the last few weeks, even, so who knows! The new study could be wrong, or it could actually be a new finding. We probably won't be able to make a decent assessment for years.

Bamboozle

Yours is cooler, gneiss. You actually found that. I would crap my pants if I ever found something like that. All I had to do was fork over some cash.