As I continue adding to my prehistoric sleeve, take a look at the most recent addition to my arm – a marine-dwelling ammonite! This group of extinct mollusks died out about 66 million years ago, having lived during the dinosaurs’ heyday of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. They are also excellent index fossils, helping to link the rock layer in which a particular species is found to specific geologic time periods.
The name "ammonite" was inspired by the spiral shape of their shells, which resemble tightly coiled rams' horns. Pliny the Elder called them ammonis cornua ("horns of Ammon") because the Egyptian god Ammon was typically depicted wearing rams' horns. Fossilized ammonites show an enormous range in size, from the very small to the height of a human, but this one fits perfectly on my tricep! 🦑
These matching tattoos my wife and I recently got are very meaningful to us on multiple levels. On our lower legs, hers says “half-doomed” while mine reads “semi-sweet,” a reference to the lyrics from Fall Out Boy’s “Disloyal Order of Water Buffaloes”:
I'm a loose bolt of a complete machine
What a match
I'm half-doomed and you're semi-sweet.
That was the song my wife walked down the aisle to at our wedding and has always been a line that we loved – relating to the fact that we may not be perfect, but we’re perfect together. Our fondness for FOB dates back to our high school days, and it’s also one of the first things we bonded over, singing duets of their songs in the car when we first started dating. Here’s to many more years of those car rides & rock and roll vibes. Forever grateful we found each other, Jenny 🖤🤘