| Class: | Real Animal |
| Hab: | Marine, any |
| Fre: | Common |
| Num: | Smaller: schools of 10-10,000, Larger: pack of 10-20, Folk by culture |
| Lair: | n/a; nomadic; "kraken" may Lair 40% |
| Size: | 1' to 30' (real); 100' "krakens," mile-long "living island" varieties |
| Move: | Moderate swim or very fast water-jet |
| Def: | Very tough rubbery, resilient hide and flesh; stone-hard shell |
| Att: | 12 tentacles + vicious beak |
| Int: | Beasts Low to high animal; Folk smarter than Humans |
| Spec: | Benthic depth adaptations; May have regeneration. Ammonite Folk show a propensity for majic |
| Posns: | Beasts: incidental, from prey, Folk: by civilization |
Ammonites rather resembled nautiluses, both being squid-like mollusks in snail-like shells. Ammonites cruised the seas for some 330 millions of years, surviving several mass-extinctions that whipped out other major groups of creatures. Real-world ammonites included species of up to at least ten foot in diameter; Swedish fossil fragments suggest diameters of over thirty foot.
Ammonites used their many tentacles to secure prey while their powerful beaks cracked shells and snipped off bite-sized portions.
Most are very well adapted to the benthic depths, with Dark Vision, very acute senses of scent and touch, and can "hear" vibrations through the water at a great distance. They can adapt to changes in depth (and pressure) amazingly readily, due to the tough yet compressible nature of their flesh. They regulate their depth by altering the pressure on the gas sacs within the coil of their shell.
Giant "living island" varieties may not be able to sink. Instead, they float lazily on the surface, even accumulating a layer of dirt, vegetation, and birds' nests on their backs. To feed, they splay out a wide-ranging net of tentacles, each of the ten great tentacles supporting a curtain of lesser tentacles developed form the barbed suckers of their lesser cousins. The barbs inject a stinging toxin to paralyze prey. Luckily for mariners, "living island" ammonites only lift their tentacles from the sea if provoked.
Ammonite Folk appear very suddenly in the fossil record, accompanied, not coincidentally, by a plethora of novel plant and animal life forms. This is because the Ammonites are not indigenous to Earth but rather were one of the several waves of alien civilizations to colonize Earth in ancient times. The cephalopods we know today (nautilus, squid, and octopus) are degenerate descendants of cross-breeding programs between similar Ammonite and indigenous Earth species, both star-faring alien Folk and the menageries they brought with them for various reasons, experiments conducted to help them adapt to life on Earth.
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