Virtual Ammonites

Abstract

How can we reconstruct the life of an extinct animal, such as an ancient ammonite? How is it that paleontologists have revivified dinosaurs as agile and obstreperous? How can they assert that a pterodactyl could fly rather than simply glide? These and many more feats of apparent sorcery fill the scientific journals and sometimes spill over onto the wide screen and the wider popular consciousness. They derive from a type of scientific analysis called functional morphology, which is a way of studying biological structures to determine not how they looked but how they worked and what they did. This form of analysis is among the most useful of time machines.