Swimming with ammonites, as reported in ScienceDaily 7 April and Paleobiology, 2015; 1 doi: 10.1017/pab.2014.17. A team of researchers led by René Hoffmann of Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have examined fossil ammonites with high resolution CT scans in order to work out whether these creatures had enough buoyancy to swim like a modern day nautilus. A nautilus has a spiral shell consisting of a series of chambers. The animal itself lives in the outermost chamber, with the others being filled with gas, giving it the buoyancy needed to float in the water column. As the animal grows it adds more chambers, which means it maintains enough buoyancy to match the increasing mass of its body plus the shell. Ammonites also consisted of a series of chambers arranged in a spiral, but there has been some debate as to whether they swam like a nautilus or lived on the bottom of the sea. The scientists have used the CT scans to calculate the volume of gas in the chambers as well as get an accurate measure of the mass of the shell. They estimated the mass of the animal based on studies of living nautiluses. They concluded that ammonites had enough gas filled chambers to enable them to swim freely in the water column throughout their lives.
Editorial Comment: The living nautilus is an example of brilliant design. Even though it has a heavy shell it can float freely in the water column because of the gas filled chambers. It can also move up and down by altering its
buoyancy by injecting or removing fluid from the gas filled chambers. In other words, it had neutral buoyancy mechanisms before we designed submarines to do the same. It is good to see evidence that ammonites, which were always considered a type of extinct nautilus, seemed to have the same abilities. The nautilus is also a good example of a living fossil, since it is claimed oldest fossils are just like living ones. In other words, they have not evolved, but have multiplied after their kind. Although ammonites are extinct they show no evidence of having ever been any other creature. The oldest dated ammonite is a fully formed ammonite. We wonder how evolutionists think that free swimming shelled creatures in ‘natural submarines’ evolved from bottom dwelling shelled creatures? It is not enough to randomly evolve a gas filled chamber. That is no use to the creature unless it knows how to control it. The evidence shows that ammonites were always fully functioning creatures that multiplied after their kind until they became extinct as part of the general degeneration of the world following man’s sin and God’s judgement. (Ref. design, fossils, marine biology, molluscs)
Evidence News vol. 15, No. 6
29 April 2015
Creation Research Australia