17" Silver Iridescent Ammonite (Cleoniceras) Fossil - Madagascar

Silver Iridescent Ammonite (Cleoniceras) Fossil - Madagascar #240198

This is a huge, 17" wide, silver iridescent ammonite fossil quarried near Mahajanga Province, Madagascar. It is the genus Cleoniceras which inhabited the shallow seas approximately 110 million years ago. It is an extremely large specimen, with a lot of purple iridescence to it's shell when viewed from the right angles. There is still some areas of hard matrix attached to the shell.

Ammonites were predatory mollusks that resembled a squid with a shell. These cephalopods had eyes, tentacles, and spiral shells. They are more closely related to a living octopus, though the shells resemble that of a nautilus. Ammonites appeared in the fossil record about 240 million years ago and they barely survived several major extinction events. The last lineages disappeared 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous.

Artists reconstruction of an ammonite. By Nobu Tamura

More about ammonites