John Thompson
Northern News Services

Iqaluit (July 04/05) - Adamie Ipeelie discovered more than he bargained for when he went hunting for stone to carve in Apex recently.

He pried apart a cracked piece of limestone to discover the fossilized remains of a creature that perished about 450 million years ago.

"It looked like a big drill bit," he said. "I didn't know what it was."

Stretching across 40 centimetres is the twisting shell of a nautiloid, which resembled a squid decked out in a hard shell for armour.

"It's a nice specimen," said Dr. Godfrey Nowlan at the Geological Survey of Canada in Calgary, who was contacted by researchers in Iqaluit after Ipeelie approached them with his find. "You can imagine a bunch of tentacles reaching out of that."

Ipeelie's nautiloid would have lived alongside giant snails and algae growths resembling the spiral-patterned centres of sunflowers, at a time when most of the North American continent was submerged in a shallow tropical ocean, Nowlan said.

The shell holds a series of chambers, with only the largest inhabited by the creature. As the nautiloid grew, so did its shell. Eventually an old chamber would be abandoned for a new one. Scientists believe the abandoned chambers held gas that helped the creature control its buoyancy, much like a modern-day submarine.

Baffin Island may be divided by the Arctic Circle today, but during the nautiloid's time, the equator cut across it.

Since then the shifting of tectonic plates has moved the land mass to far colder climes, but it wasn't always that way.

"It was once a tropical paradise," Nowlan said.