This gas would have combined with water vapor to form sulfuric acid, leading to a sharp and sudden drop in ocean pH. Furthermore, their complex coiled shells, while hydrodynamically efficient and perhaps used for buoyancy control, may have been a liability in the chaotic aftermath of the impact.
Why Ammonites Failed to Adapt to the Climate Shift
Yet, around 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period, every last ammonite vanished from the fossil record, snuffed out in the same cataclysmic event that eliminated the non-avian dinosaurs. Their mode of reproduction and development played a critical role.
The most widely accepted cause is the impact of a massive asteroid or comet, approximately 10 to 15 kilometers in diameter, which struck the Earth near what is now the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Why Ammonites Were Especially Vulnerable While the K-Pg event was a global catastrophe, the reasons ammonites were hit so much harder than their distant cousins, the nautilus, lie in their specific biology and life history.
Why Ammonites Failed to Adapt to the Climate Shift
The Final Chapter: The K-Pg Extinction Event The leading scientific explanation for the ammonites’ demise points to the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event, formerly known as the K-T event. Their reliance on a healthy, sunlit ocean made them a canary in the coal mine, and they perished as the ecosystem they dominated collapsed.
More About Why did ammonites go extinct
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