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On 18 June 2019, the Twitter account StrataGeoData posted an image of a giant ammonite fossil: Several readers alerted Snopes to the picture, concerned that it was perhaps a hoax. In fact, the fossil displayed is a famous specimen first reported in 1947 by British Columbia Geological Survey geologist Chuck Newmarch outside the town of Fernie, British Columbia, as reported in Mountain Culture< magazine: Andy Randell, who tweeted the picture of the fossil from his companies’ social media accounts, confirmed this was the specimen in question. The expedition by Randell's non-profit society, Below BC, is a project to explore parts of British Columbia’s geological heritage. He provided further background on the photograph: Ammonites went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period at the same time as the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago. But in the 140 million years before that event, some species of ammonites evolved into very large, very capable predators, and the specimen shown in the tweet is far from the largest ammonite fossil on record. That honor belongs to a 78-million-year-old fossil of the ammonite species Parapuzosia seppenradensis found near the town of Munster, Germany. The animal that formed this incomplete fossil would have been over eight feet in diameter.
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