Unraveling how an extinct mollusk got its strange shell

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December 12, 2021

By: New York Times |

December 12, 2021 6:31:00 pm

Images provided by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) show
fossilized ammonites with chiral shells, including (a) Turrilites costatus from
Cenomanian, France; (b) Colchidites breistrofferi from Barremian, Colombia; (c)
Nipponites mirabilis from Turonian, Japan; and (d) computed tomography scans of N.
mirabilis. (French National Center for Scientific Research via The New York Times)
Written by Sabrina Imbler

If you’ve seen one ammonite, you may think you’ve seen them all. Most of the 10,000
species of the extinct cephalopods sported tightly coiled shells with polite mouthfuls of
tentacles.

Enter Nipponites mirabilis, a species of ammonite straight out of an M.C. Escher

painting. In place of the classic, coiled-snake shell design, it substituted something far
more ludicrous: a convoluted shell twisting into itself with no obvious beginning or end.

“It looks like a chunk of rope that someone threw out a window,” said Kathleen
Ritterbush, a paleoecologist at the University of Utah.

“The first time you look at it, it’s just this tangled mess,” said Derek Moulton, a
mathematician at the University of Oxford. “And then you start to look closely and say,
oh, actually there is a regularity there.”

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Moulton and colleagues developed a mathematical model that they say reveals the forces
acting on Nipponites’ baffling shells and the shells of many other mollusks. The research
was published in November in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Their model suggests a mismatch between the growth rates of the mollusk’s soft body and
its hard shell, which creates mechanical forces that twist the body, resulting in an
asymmetric shell. The model also explains how other snails develop their characteristic
spiraling shells, the researchers said.

“It’s a beautiful result,” said Katharine Long, an applied mathematician at Texas Tech
University, who was not involved with the research. “This is the simplest model that can
possibly produce all three forms,” Long added, referring to the traditional spiral of an
ammonite shell, the helical spiral of a snail and the meandering swerves of Nipponites.

Read more |Fossil of giant scorpion that lived 400 million years ago discovered in China
The paper is the latest collaboration between Moulton; Alain Goriely, chair of
mathematical modeling at Oxford; and Régis Chirat, a researcher at the University of
Lyon in France. The three scientists seek to understand the physics underlying seashell
formation. They have published on the spiny shells of sea snails and the interlocking
shells of oysters.

In one of the team’s early meetings, Moulton and Goriely visited Chirat in Paris, and the
trio spent an afternoon admiring the shells and ammonites within the Grand Gallery of
Evolution at the National Museum of Natural History.

“Like children inside Willie Wonka’s factory,” Goriely said.

But the knots of Nipponites were perplexing. “Nipponites has become an obsession for
me,” Chirat said over a Zoom call from his office, which holds hundreds of fossils and
seashells.

Mollusks create their own shells using their mantle, a fleshy outer organ. The mantle
secretes calcium carbonate in layers, which harden into the shell. The researchers wanted
to design a model that captured the interactions between the mollusk’s soft body and the
shell as it hardened.

When ammonites died out about 66 million years ago, they left few traces of their squishy
insides in the fossil record. But evidence suggests that ammonites, like their living squid
cousins, were bilaterally symmetrical; drawing a line down the middle would result in
symmetrical halves. So the researchers built their model on the assumption that
ammonites were bilaterally symmetrical.

So how could a symmetric body secrete an asymmetric shell? “Suppose there is a

mismatch between the way the body is growing and the way the shell is growing,”
Moulton said. “That’s the whole premise of the model.”

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If the body grows faster than the shell, it will be too big for its shell house and will
generate mechanical stress that leads the body to twist inside the shell. Moulton offered
an analogy: Imagine the ammonite shell as a long, hard tube stuffed with two soft pool
noodles that are longer than the tube. To relieve the stress, the noodles (the soft body)
twist inside the tube (the shell). As the soft body twists, it rotates the edge of the mantle
secreting the shell, resulting in an asymmetric shell.

“If the conditions are right, these abnormal shapes like Nipponites emerge,” Moulton
said.

By tweaking the level of the mismatch and stiffness properties of the soft body in the
model, the researchers produced the bizarre shells of other unorthodox ammonites, such
as Didymoceras.

“First he’s straight, and then he’s a paper clip, and then he’s an upside-down ice cream
cone coil, and then he’s a hook shape,” Ritterbush said, describing Didymoceras.

But there are other questions left unanswered by the model, she said, including the
biological costs, benefits and trade-offs of having such an asymmetric shell.

Recent research suggests Nipponites’ wild shell helped the ammonite slowly pirouette in
the water column in search of prey. Kenneth De Baets, a paleobiologist at Friedrich-
Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany, who was not involved with the
new study, said he is curious to see how the model holds up as paleontologists uncover
more fossilized soft ammonite tissue.

“These animals have been dismissed as oddballs and mistakes,” Ritterbush said. “But it is
actually a perfectly executed plan, a spiral coil of balance.”

But even with these questions, Ritterbush said, the new model underscores how
seemingly bizarre shapes like Didymoceras and Nipponites are more like ordinary
ammonites than they might appear.

“It lends credence to the idea that for an animal to produce a shell like this would not
require moving heaven and Earth,” she said. “It would not require some incredibly
strange evolutionary leap.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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