Thanks for playing #Paleomoji this week! The answer is: Ammonite!

Why ??
This story might blow your mind: buckle up!

It begins in a hidden town in the Western Desert of Egypt, nearly 50 centuries ago. From this base in Siwa the worship of an obscure god made its way into the power centers of the Nile.

This god was Ammon - the horned god of the desert; from this the name Ammonite means "follower of Ammon". Worshiped in Ancient Libya he was later brought into Egypt as Amun or Amun-Re.

(As a side note, Amun became so important in the New Kingdom of Egypt that pharaohs were named for him. Ever heard of... TutankhAMUN?)

Worship of this diety was introduced to Ancient Greece early on through their colony at Cyrene, where Ammon was encountered by a young Alexander the Great.

As Alexander's fame and association with the sun grew, his followers expropriated "the horns of Ammon" as his occasional symbol. Hence, these ram's horns would have been a well-known symbol across the ancient world.
Check out the horns on this Alexandrian coin!

This specifically Hellenic connection may have been essential because we first associate the term Ammonite with fossil shells through the writing of Pliny the Elder (remember the badass Roman naturalist / Navy commander who died during a rescue in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius?)

Pliny died, but his famous work Naturalis Historiae survived, from which we get the name Ammonite for curved fossil shells.
The name was formalized in 1884 by German paleontologist Karl von Zittel. Interestingly, Zittel had just returned from a failed expedition into...

...you guessed it, the Western Desert of Egypt! The ill-fated Rohlfs' expedition was eventually swamped by a massive rainstorm which turned the sand into a morass and trapped their camels. Defeated by water in one of the driest places on earth.

(Europeans are always trying to attribute their failures in Egypt to some curse, but I blame the leader - I mean look at this sketchy dude)

So in the end we're brought back full circle to an obscure place in the desert, with the odd result that Ammon is not lost to time, but endures as the name of one of the most successful animal groups in the history of life.

Makes ya think.