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The simulations were designed by Hebdon using an engineering tool called ANSYS FLUENT, and the 3-D ammonoid models were placed within virtual liquid flows. The process is nothing like the typical paleontological business of dusty fieldwork. “Our new results are all generated using computational fluid dynamics,” Ritterbush says. From there, the ammonoids are put through their paces.
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“We make replicas of real fossils by using a laser scanner to produce a 3-D model,” Ritterbush says, which are then refined by PhD student Nick Hebdon. The first step is making a digital recreation of the animals. But new technology, presented this week at an American Physical Society meeting, has allowed scientists to take their ammonoid swimming experiments a step further.Įxample image of how water flow shapes itself around an ammonoid model. In the past, University of Utah paleontologist Kathleen Ritterbush says, researchers would place physical ammonoid models in water tanks to get an idea of how the invertebrates moved.
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Paleontologists expect that all ammonoids squirted jets of water to propel themselves shell-first through the seas. Now, techniques borrowed from engineering, physics and even video games are helping experts envision and examine these extinct animals in ways never before possible. Much of what experts have learned about ammonoids is thanks to their hard shells which survive more readily in the fossil record. Learning simple behaviors of ammonoids, such as what a particular species ate, depends on delicate investigations of standout fossils, such as one ammonoid preserved with plankton in its mouth. But squishy bodies often decay before fossilization, making the details of these creatures’ anatomy difficult to pin down. Much like their extant nautilus cousins, ammonoids were soft-bodied cephalopods that lived inside coiled shells, which they grew throughout their lives. But despite their past abundance, ammonoids and their behavior still remain something of a mystery to scientists. The marine creatures were so numerous and evolved at such a rapid pace that paleontologists often use ammonoids as index fossils-specific species that mark particular swaths of prehistory, allowing scientists to date layers of rock by identifying the ammonoid fossils. From about 66 to 409 million years ago, thousands of species of these shelled cephalopods thrived in seas all over the planet. Nobu Tamura via Wikicommons under CC BY 3.0Īmmonoids are one of the world’s greatest evolutionary success stories. Although ammonoids died out around the same time as most dinosaurs, new computer models are revealing how these marine animals moved through the water.