In 1693 English physics professor and member of the Royal Society, John Woodward, published an essay on the evidence for Noah's flood. One of his aims was to combat the popular ideas of the pagan Greek philosopher, Aristotle, that fossils were made inside the earth by mysterious forces and were not the remains of real creatures at all. In 1708, Woodward's follower, the Swiss flood geologist, Scheuchzer, wrote a pamplet that has a large Pike fish in Lake Constance (Switzerland) presenting the proof in excellent Latin that fossils are not "mineral offspring of stone and marl" but the remains of once living creatures. Scheuchzer was attempting to give Biblical flood geology credibility in a Christian Europe still largely under the academic influence of ancient pagan Greek thought.
Scheuchzer's student, Baier, wrote the book, 'Nurnberg Petrology' in which he assembled a large number of Ammonites to show they were not freaks of nature, but true shells, and that most fossils had resulted from Noah's flood. The compelling Science of Scheuchzer and Baier forced people to accept that fossils were indeed the remains of previously live creatures and propelled Flood geology into main stream science.
Ammonites were not named after the Biblical Ammonites (descendants of Abraham's relative, Lot - Gen 19:38, Deut 2:20), but after an Egyptian god.
The shape of their shells suggests the curling ram horns on the Egyptian god, Ammon. Ammon-ite means "Ammon stones". Each year the creature in the shell would add a larger chamber to the front of the shell, and the animal would move into it. Where the new chamber joined the old one was an angular growth line.
By 1724, the creationist Ehrhart had shown that Ammonites were similar to modern day Nautilus shells. Like their present-day cousins, the ocean-dwelling Nautilus, they possessed the ability to use gas pressure to produce neutral buoyancy inside empty shell chambers. This enabled them to rise or sink with ease, like a modern submarine. Man didn't invent the submarine, God did!