#ammonidea

I don't know if any one of you own a microscope, or even just a magnifying glass, but the large world of tiny things, textures and even organisms is facinating to me!

Like landing on another planet, where everything seems so alien but also weirdly familiar!

I needed a LONG time to really figure out my microscope with its software and all its quirks and faults. (Because it was a fairly cheap microscope, I am not that rich!) But in the last weeks I saw some fascinating things through it and now I want to share :D

Let's start off with my Ammonidea (or Ammonoid) fossil!

This is my own and personal Ammonidea! It is roughly 3-5 centimeters in diameter (depends on where you measure) and the side we are seeing now is the polished inside structure of this extinct aquatic animal!

Here we have the part that was originally on the outside of the animal! The partitions you can see in the first picture are chambers that helped with controlling boiancy and stability of the shell, and you can kinda see then here from the other side as well. I like to imagine it like a modern day snail. If you observe a garden snail, or pretty much anything with a calcium carbonate shell (snails, many aquatic animals, or the shells Hermitcrabs use) you can see those layers the calcium is deposited at as the animal grows.

This is a 4x magnification of that grainy section on the left of the first image. I think some small rocks got in the shell when it fossilised. And the spec in the middle even looks like a smaller shell or dead organism in there, but I can't confirm that sadly!

Another 4x magnification, but of one of the partitions of the shell. You can tell it was polished on this inside, side here, because the outside is much roughter. If you find a fossil like this out in nature it will be most likely whole, so no inside parts are visible, or if it is splitt open naturally, it won't look this polished. But lucky for us the polish let's us see the partitions more clearly!

Looks weirdly gross. But that is just the center of the shell. You can see the chambers starting around it. It is also only 4x magnified. Fun fact: In life the Ammonidea were MUCH more hollow! And that space was filled with their organs. Hard to imagine for me, but interesting!

A little blurry, and by the way, idk where the yellow tinge comes from, it is not as bad when I look through with my eyes, but I obvously can't capture that! Maybe it is the a little ,off camera that is in the lense I was using because the analogue lenses are more translucent, the camera lense isn't see through at all, maybe the microscopes light is yellowish... Anyway, here you can see a few 4x cracks in the structure.

Ohhh, that's the outside of the shell there! Looks less polished in my opinion. A little dirt in the top left and you can see the "stripes" of the shells layers. (4x magnified) Also very similar to modern day snail shells.

Now that looks like nothing, but it is the inside of the shell, between the segment lines 10x magnified! Nice color! And you can see that no mather how much you polish a surface, it will never be 100% smoothe.

And here is that segment line 10x magnified. That texture on the right is also interesting, can't tell you why it is here but not on the previouse one xD

And here is the outside texture magnified 10x. Not much to see but the texture. I am suprised I didn't catch a micro organism in any of these yet, (exept that shell looking one I suspect was an organism at some point) because the fossil is not sterile to my knowlege.

Looks like a different UNIVERSE at such small scales and not to mention that there are microscopes out there magnifying 100x or even more! And my maximum is only 10-20x which is horrible to focus most times (that's why I don't have any 20x images in here)

Also look at that! Ammonidea are kinda translucent! Didn't expect that at all before putting it on the microscope lamp! You can see the structure there as well, and the translucent bits were where the soft tissue once was.

And just for fun: A map of different shells I found on the Ammonidea Wikipedia page! I believe the one in the middle, on the right is the most similar to mine! Here is the source for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonoidea

Now let's continue with microscopic images of a bee! Yes you read that right! A bee! (I have some preserved bees in a small case)

This should be the bees hair on its body. Here it was hard to figure out what part of the bee I was looking at because it looks very similar to all the other hair on the bee. (Like I would put it on the small table of the microscope, on one of those little dishes, like a small patient at the doctors. And I would see the bees parts but is that their leg? Antennae? Back?...)

But I am pretty sure that THIS is the eye of the bee! Suprisingly also hairy, and you can see all the small partitions of the bees eye!

And lastly: A dried cucumber! I was microscoping that because I am working on an experiment, but I decided to share these 2 now because I am already on that topic xD

This is the flesh of the dried cucumber, very wrinkly, very yellow, very ... fibery. I haven't looked at a fresh one under the microscope yet, but I think I should now! I think it would look very different. ALso this is not the part with the seeds, but the part between the seeds and the peel.

And here we have the skin! It looks like I put glitter on it, but I promise you I didn't! Also very wrinkly, and yellowish.

Well, I hope you liked my fascination with that microscope! Really, I recommend you try it as well! I don't have as many facts about this stuff as I thought, because you know... it's a cucumbe a bee and a fossil.

Oh, I actually have one more! Ammonidea are a great way to date rock because different sub species of them were around for specific times in history & the species you find tells you how old the rock probably is!