Taxonomic diversity and morphological disparity of paleozoic ammonoids

The Ammonoidea are well represented in terms of numbers of species over a large range of time and they have survived many extinction events. The time interval from the Early Devonian through to the Triassic has seen ammonoid groups evolve and become extinct. The evolutionary history of the Paleozoic ammonoids was punctuated by some extinction events with near extinction events and subsequent recoveries. A Principal Components Analysis (PCA) based on the conch width index (CWI), umbilical width index (UWI) and whorl expansion rate (WER) parameters from 4834 ammonoid species of Devonian to Triassic age produced an empirical morphospace this time interval. The morphospace of Paleozoic ammonoids shows some subtle changes between the periods, but generally, the occupied area is remarkably similar

Mature Modifications and Sexual Dimorphism

Allometric growth between different parts of the shell often hampers the identification of mollusk shells, particularly in such cases where preadult shell growth varies strongly. Especially in gastropods, the terminal aperture is often less variable and yields morphological information essential for species determination (e.g. Vermeij 1993; Urdy et al. 2010a, b). In fossil mollusk shells, the adult aperture (peristome)is often missing, partially due to an early death, and partially due to destructive processes, which occurred post mortem (taphonomy). Therefore, the entire shell ontogeny is known only from a small fraction of all ammonoid taxa (e.g., Landman et al. 2012). Nevertheless, knowledge of the adult shell of ammonoids is very important since it can yield morphological information essential for systematics and for the reconstruction of various aspects of their paleobiology