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Jurassic era fossil of squid-like creature attacking prey

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  • Jurassic era fossil of squid-like creature attacking prey

    Due to the nature of their bodies finding that of one which fossilized is pretty rare. Finding one that had apparently just killed it's prey is obviously much rarer.

    Source: 200 million-year-old fossil shows oldest 'squid attack' on record



    xnJnpxsXxVRAzpoddTL7X6-1200-80.jpg
    Damaged head and body of the fish, with the arms of the squid-like creature clamped around it.

    An ancient squid-like creature with 10 arms covered in hooks had just crushed the skull of its prey in a vicious attack when disaster struck, killing both predator and prey, according to a Jurassic period fossil of the duo found on the southern coast of England.

    This 200 million-year-old fossil was originally discovered in the 19th century, but a new analysis reveals that it's the oldest known example of a coleoid, or a class of cephalopods that includes octopuses, squid and cuttlefish, attacking prey.

    That attack was vicious, said study lead researcher, Malcolm Hart, emeritus professor of micropaleontology at the University of Plymouth in England.

    "The head [of the fish] has been bitten through; the bones have got sharp edges where they've literally been crushed and broken," Hart told Live Science. "So this thing probably attacked the fish quite violently — the bones in the head of the fish are just literally smashed."

    Hart examined what he called the "most unusual, if not extraordinary fossil" in 2019, while it was on exhibit at Lyme Regis Museum in England, on loan from the British Geological Survey.

    The photos he took magnify the details of the predator, an extinct squid relative known as a belemnoid. These ancient creatures would have used the hardened hooks covering their 10 arms to catch prey. In contrast, modern squid have eight "regular" arms and two elongated arms, which are usually covered with suckers, although a few species do have hooks on some or all of their arms, said Michael Vecchione, an invertebrate zoologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., who was not involved with the study.

    "In some squids, those suckers develop into hooks," Vecchione told Live Science. "But they're not like the hooks that are in the belemnoids. They probably function very similarly — they're used to grab hold of soft things that you can't grab hold of with a sucker." However, hooks are developmentally different in squids and belemnoids, but possibly arose to be similar through convergent evolution, a process in which animals that are not closely related develop similar characteristics.

    In the new analysis, the researchers identified the belemnoid as Clarkeiteuthis montefiorei. The 16-inch-long (40 centimeters) squid relative was chowing down on an 8-inch-long (20 cm) herring-like fish that had been identified as Dorsetichthys bechei. The fossil dates to the Sinemurian, an age within the Jurassic period that spanned from 190 million to 199 million years ago. The next oldest known fossil of a coleoid devouring dinner is from Bavaria, Germany, and it’s about 10 million years younger than this one, Hart said.

    Given that the squid had its arms wrapped around the fish, and that the fish's head had sustained injuries (likely from the hungry squid), it doesn't appear that these animals died separately and happened to be fossilized together, Hart said.

    Rather, Hart and his colleagues hypothesized two scenarios that could have led to this unique 24-inch-long (60 cm) fossil.

    It's possible that the fish was too big for the squid relative, or that it became stuck in the predator's jaws. This could have killed the squid, which would have sunk to the seafloor with its last meal and undergone fossilization.

    However, even Hart admits that this plot has a few holes. For instance, it's strange that a scavenger didn't eat these dead animals, Hart said. The Dorset and East Devon Coast, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is home to other Jurassic fossils such as "huge ichthyosaurs and pliosaurs, and they would have eaten anything," Hart said. "The question is why the two of them [the belemnoid and fish] got preserved without getting eaten — that we don't understand."

    Vecchione added that modern squid eat prey one bite at a time, so it doesn't make sense that the fish would have been too large for the squid.

    "The belemnoids did have beaks and probably bit pieces off just like a modern squid would. So, the prey being too large for it just doesn't make sense," Vecchione said. "A modern squid can grab a fish as big as it is and then kill it and slowly eat it. So I would think that a belemnoid probably could as well."

    The other idea is that the belemnoid took its prey to the seafloor in a strategy known as "distraction sinking," which would have helped it avoid other predators. However, perhaps the seafloor had low oxygen levels, which would have led to suffocation and death.

    Still, Hart noted that he's studied the Charmouth Mudstone formations, where this fossil was found, and noticed that it's abundant in "microfossils that would have required oxygen," he said.

    So, it remains a mystery how this squid-like creature and its prey ended up fossilized.

    The study has been accepted for publication in the journal Proceedings of the Geologists' Association and was presented May 6 as part of Sharing Geoscience Online, a virtual alternative to the European Geosciences Union's annual meeting.




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    Since it has only been accepted I haven't found the paper or even abstract yet so I'll make do with the Smithsonian's report on it:

    Source: 200-Million-Year-Old Fossil Captures Squid Viciously Entangled With Its Prey


    The specimen may be the earliest known example of a squid-like creature on the attack

    Paleontologists have discovered a vicious undersea attack frozen in stone for nearly 200 million years. In the fossil’s hardened sediments, an ancient squid-like creature called Clarkeiteuthis montefiorei has its prey wrapped up in tentacles studded with hooks, according to a statement from the University of Plymouth. The skull of the herring-like fish Dorsetichthys bechei appears to have been violently crushed, perhaps by the cephalopod’s beak.

    Researchers aren’t sure how the deadly drama came to be preserved just before its denouement, but the find may be the earliest known example of a squid-like predator attacking its prey.

    “The predation is off-the-scale in terms of rare occurrence,” Malcom Hart, a paleontologist emeritus at the University of Plymouth who led the research, tells George Dvorsky of Gizmodo. “There are only a very few specimens—between five to 10—known from the Jurassic, and this is the only one from this stratigraphical level in Dorset. It is also the oldest known in any part of the world.”

    The 23-inch fossil at the center of the new analysis, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, was first unearthed in the 19th century from the Jurassic coast (also known as the Dorset coast) of southern England. Following its discovery, the specimen was housed in the collections of the British Geological Survey.

    "I was going through some new material in a private collection, and was told that this specimen was on loan to Lyme Regis Museum," Hart tells Rosie McCall of Newsweek. "I recognized it immediately for what was there—the ink sack of the squid—and the fish being held by the arms of the squid. The previous week I had been looking at a paper that mentioned the 'oldest' known example of such predation—and here I was looking at something a few millions of years older."

    The researchers say this fossil dates back to the Sinemurian period, roughly 190 million years ago, predating what was thought to be the oldest example of such an interaction by some 10 million years, according to the paper.

    The researchers offer two possible explanations for how this prehistoric pair came to be preserved in a tentacled embrace.

    The first is that the Clarkeiteuthis, an extinct type of internal-shelled cephalopod called a belemnoid, bit off more than it could chew. In this scenario, the fish was so large that it became stuck in the jaws of the Clarkeiteuthis, which then sank to the seafloor under the weight of a dinner it could not eat and was preserved in the mud.

    The second theory is that the squid intentionally sank itself and its prey to the bottom to avoid being eaten itself while feeding—a behavior observed in living squid called “distraction sinking.” The researchers hypothesize that as the animals sank they entered water that was so low in oxygen they suffocated and were eventually preserved on the bottom.

    Hart tells Gizmodo that it’s surprising that these dead combatants didn’t wind up eaten by something else before being encased in sediment.

    "Fossils that show the interaction between predators and prey are very rare— but other examples of this exact species of belemnoid having captured fish during the last moments of their life are known and written about in the literature," Thomas Clements, a paleontologist at the University of Birmingham who was not involved in the research, tells Newsweek. However, he adds, “the fossil does show that potentially, some belemnoid cephalopods had eyes too big for their belly!"



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  • #2
    Nice picture of real life and eath fossils.
    Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
    Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
    But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act III:

    go with the flow the river knows . . .

    Frank

    I do not know, therefore everything is in pencil.

    Comment


    • #3
      Gnarly.
      sigpic

      Comment


      • #4
        It looks like it tried to bite off more than he could chew.
        Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
        Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
        But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act III:

        go with the flow the river knows . . .

        Frank

        I do not know, therefore everything is in pencil.

        Comment

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