Who bit my ammonite?
the pathology’s tale
WEBINAR
By Richard Maddra (Bradford)
30th March 2023 19:00 BST
Missed it?
ABSTRACT
Everyone likes a well-preserved ammonite with all its coils intact. They are seen as objects of beauty and as ornaments. Although lacking the beauty of an intact specimen, a damaged or deformed ammonite has a story to tell: predation, parasite, epizoan or illness could all leave a mark on the conch. Some ammonites succumbed to their injuries; others were able to repair or compensate for the damage. Recently, ammonites with charactersitic semi-circular damage have been identified as the victims of coleoid predation and the first such specimens from the Upper Lias of Yorkshire were identified in 2012.
BIOGRAPHY
Richard Maddra is a primary school teacher whose love of palaeontology could be described as an obsession. In his daughter's words, “Is there anywhere we can take you where you won't look at rocks and find something?”
Over the past decade, Richard has focused on ammonites. He has been fortunate enough to find specimens that became the subject of scientific papers: the first on fatally bitten ammonites from the Upper Lias of Saltwick Bay (2015) and the second on an in-situ aptychus in Cleviceras (2022). The predated ammonites can be seen in the Yorkshire Museum. Richard has also written for the Circular on ammonoid predation and pathologies in the Robinson Collection (630) and on fossils in spoil heaps (635). He continues to work on ammonites as prey and on ammonite aptychi.
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