Murder investigations have become more popular over the past hundred million years or so. Even very old unsolved murder cases sometimes arouse public interest. Here is a newly reported very old case:
“Death by ammonite: fatal ingestion of an ammonoid shell by an Early Jurassic bony fish,” Samuel L. A. Cooper and Erin E. Maxwell, Geological Magazine, vol. 160, no. 7, 2023. (Thanks to Tom Gill for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Universitas Brawijaya, Malang, Indonesia, report:
“A remarkable specimen of the actinopterygian fish Pachycormus macropterus from the Early Jurassic (Toarcian) Posidonienschiefer Formation of Germany exceptionally preserves an unusually large ammonite inside its gut…. The fish’s stomach provided a microenvironment protecting the aragonite from chemical dissolution.”