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Description
Woops! I've been a little busy the past week or so and forgot to add an update.. I'll add a few this week to make up for it! =3

This is an Ammonite, an extinct Cephalopod related to modern day squids, octopi, cuttlefish, and Nautilus. Ammonites lived from the Devonian period to the late Cretaceous, or 400 to 66 million years ago, and died out at the same time the dinosaurs. These animals had coiled shells and were incredibly abundant during their time, which has in-turn made their shells very easy to come by as fossils and are often interesting to look at. Their shells have complex suture lines, stitching one chamber of the shell other chambers of the shells during the process of making new chambers, making them recognizable from the simple suture lines of nautiloids. These animals, like all shelled-Cephalopods, got their buoyancy by filling their chambers, called septae, with air and controlling how much air or water was in each septa at a time. The fossilized shells vary greatly with size, ranging from about a fingernail to almost as tall as a person. The shells are frequently used as decoration or jewelry, or sometimes held in museums depending on the specimen.

They're thought to have been more closely related to coleoids (squids, octopi, cuttlefish) than to nautiloids, so I based the animal's soft body mostly on those animals in general. I drew the soft body with a total of 10 appendages, 2 tentacles and 8 arms, based on a fossilized coleoid called Belemnites, which had 10 arms without specialized tentacles, squids with the same 10 appendage count, and cuttlefish, which also have the same 10 appendages; octopi are specialized in this regard.

I thought the shells were just beautiful, but I thought the animal was so much more interesting seeing what once lived in the shell.

Drawing (c) me,

Description
Woops! I've been a little busy the past week or so and forgot to add an update.. I'll add a few this week to make up for it! =3

This is an Ammonite, an extinct Cephalopod related to modern day squids, octopi, cuttlefish, and Nautilus. Ammonites lived from the Devonian period to the late Cretaceous, or 400 to 66 million years ago, and died out at the same time the dinosaurs. These animals had coiled shells and were incredibly abundant during their time, which has in-turn made their shells very easy to come by as fossils and are often interesting to look at. Their shells have complex suture lines, stitching one chamber of the shell other chambers of the shells during the process of making new chambers, making them recognizable from the simple suture lines of nautiloids. These animals, like all shelled-Cephalopods, got their buoyancy by filling their chambers, called septae, with air and controlling how much air or water was in each septa at a time. The fossilized shells vary greatly with size, ranging from about a fingernail to almost as tall as a person. The shells are frequently used as decoration or jewelry, or sometimes held in museums depending on the specimen.

They're thought to have been more closely related to coleoids (squids, octopi, cuttlefish) than to nautiloids, so I based the animal's soft body mostly on those animals in general. I drew the soft body with a total of 10 appendages, 2 tentacles and 8 arms, based on a fossilized coleoid called Belemnites, which had 10 arms without specialized tentacles, squids with the same 10 appendage count, and cuttlefish, which also have the same 10 appendages; octopi are specialized in this regard.

I thought the shells were just beautiful, but I thought the animal was so much more interesting seeing what once lived in the shell.

Drawing (c) me,