BIZARRE, sinuous shapes twist and turn, intertwining in a mass that looks impossible to disentangle. It may look as if the woodwind players of an infernal orchestra abandoned their instruments as they left the stage, but these are the remains of some of the earth’s strangest creatures: heteromorph ammonites.
We know ammonites are the fossilised shells of extinct creatures that lived millions of years ago. Once the ocean’s dominant form of life, they are the spiral shells that pioneering 19th-century fossil hunter Mary Anning collected and sold ‘on the seashore’ in Lyme Regis in Dorset, transforming our understanding of the history of life on our planet.
Fast forward to today and Wolfgang Grulke has spent many of his 76 years collecting the fossils that fill the private museum beside his home in Dorset. It includes the unique conglomeration of 18 species of heteromorph ammonite he found in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence in the south of France. Three times in their several hundred million-year existence, ammonites uncoiled and formed new shapes unlike anything before or since. No one knows why,
