The Mystery of the Ammonites
Photo credit: Frances Goodman.
Why are there so many ammonite shells concentrated in one piece of rock? Did all these little creatures die at once, perhaps swept up in a subaquatic mudslide? Or did they die at different times, in a place where their bodies were buried by sediment as they died?
Now millions of years after the fact we may never know for sure, but paleontologists have a wealth of tools at their disposal to try and figure out where, and under what conditions, these organisms died.