Discovery of an ammonoid specimen described by Robert Hooke

Abstract

Robert Hooke (1635-1703), the remarkable polymath and one-time Curator, Fellow and Secretary of the Royal Society, provided descriptions and illustrations of many fossils. His work on ammonoids is particularly notable because he gave the first accurate descriptions and illustrations of these chambered cephalopod shells. He was also ahead of his time in their interpretation, concluding in his Micrographia of 1665 that they do owe their formation and figuration, not to any kind of Plastick virtue inherent in the earth, but to the Shells of certain Shel-fishes, which, either by some Deluge, Inundation, Earthquake, or some such other means, came to be thrown to that place, and there to be fill’d with some kind of Mudd or Clay, or petrifying Water, or some other substance, which in tract of time has been settled together and hardned in those shelly moulds into those shaped substances we now find them [and] ... that these Shells which are thus spirallied and separated with Diaphrgmes , were some kind of Nautili ... .(1). In a lecture given on 29 February 1688, Hooke also anticipated the potential of the fossils in biochronology, remarking