Articles

These cosmic wanderers have fascinated people for ages. Looking up at the night sky, each of us has at least once seen what looks like a star falling from its place, leaving a bright trail as it rushes downward. Imagine the awe of people centuries and millennia ago when a meteorite fell before their eyes. The thunderous roar, the hissing and cracking, a fiery ball streaking across the sky and crashing with an incredible boom! The memory of such an event became legends and myths, and people kept fragments of the celestial stone as sacred relics. It is no surprise that even scientists were long reluctant to recognize meteorites as real, considering tales of them to be mere fiction. It wasn’t until 1794, with the study of the Pallas Iron—a large meteorite found in Siberia—that the extraterrestrial origin of these objects was confirmed.

Ammonites are distant relatives of nautiluses, the only modern cephalopods that have retained an external shell. Their history begins in the early Paleozoic. The first cephalopods had compact, conical shells. Over time, the increase in size of these animals created a significant problem. The straight, rigid shell greatly reduced mobility, making them easy prey.

A slight curvature of the shell gave a maneuverability advantage, and over time it increased until a spiral was formed. Each coil of this spiral lay adjacent to the next, forming a solid structure. This shell design made it compact and controllable. It allowed for an active lifestyle—escaping predators and hunting agile prey. Thus, 410 million years ago, in the early Devonian period, a new subclass of cephalopods appeared—ammonites.