Englewood Shell Club March 2022 Speaker Dr Rick Batt
(From Dr Batt) I’ll be presenting a talk for the Englewood Shell Club (not far north of Sanibel) on the 15th, on “Shelled Cephalopods Past and Present” - a look at shelled cephalopods through geologic time from their start to what we have today.
A friend recently posted the first picture with information about the talk (they found the info about the speaker on our website), so I figured I’d post a bit more (a couple of the slides I’ll be referring to): the cover slide for the talk; some modern nautiloids in my collection; a fossil nautiloid (Nephriticeras magister from the Devonian Period) that I collected south of Buffalo; Robin and I at one of our Texas ammonite collecting sites with some of our haul for the day; one of our larger ammonites from Texas; an illustration from one of my published articles on ammonites; and a picture with an idea of how the cephalopod class may have been derived from other mollusks back in the early Paleozoic.
I did my doctorate (University of Colorado in Boulder) on ammonites back in the 1980’s, but unlike most ammonite research at that time (which focused on the use of ammonite species in biostratigraphy since they were considered great index fossils), my research was an investigation into whether ammonites could be used in studies of paleoecology - using fossils to interpret the environment that the organisms lived in way back then. It was an interesting concept at the time - most people who worked on ammonites (including one on my dissertation committee who I had to convince) believed that ammonites were not useful in these studies because their empty shells were thought to drift after death, so where their remains are found would not represent the environment they lived in. When I did my work, there were only about four researchers who had ventured to suggest that maybe ammonites were useful in paleoecological interpretations - and they had only published a few papers on this topic using only a small sample from small areas. For my work, I examined more than seven thousand ammonite specimens and did morphometric calculations on the shells - then I assigned these shells to morphotypes (shapes) using a classification scheme I had developed; then these were plotted on about 150 maps of my study area (the Western Interior of the US). I’ll mention a bit about the conclusions of the study in the talk.
In preparation for my research, I also needed to become an expert on the only living externally-shelled cephalopod - Nautilus (and the relatively new genus Allonautilus) - so I had to study just about every aspect of modern nautiloids - how and where they live, how they form the shell, and so on.
Looking forward to this, my first talk in a few years. Should be fun.