100-Million-Year-Old Rock Reveals 40 Never-Before-Seen Squid Species
Using a new technique for analyzing fossils locked away in chunks of rock, paleontologists in Japan and Germany have discovered a huge number of fossilized cephalopod beaks in a 100-million-year-old rock.
That included 263 squid samples – and among these samples lurked 40 species of ancient squids that scientists had never seen before.
It's a finding that reveals just how numerous squids were in the Cretaceous ocean, even though their fossilized remains are rarely found.
Related:
"In both number and size, these ancient squids clearly prevailed the seas," says paleobiologist Shin Ikegami of Hokkaido University, first author of the research.
"Their body sizes were as large as fish and even bigger than the ammonites we found alongside them. This shows us that squids were thriving as the most abundant swimmers in the ancient ocean."
To make a fossil, you generally need body parts that take a long time to decay, so that the long, often rigorous fossilization process has time to take place without destroying the remains. Most fossils are bone, tooth, shell, and claw; soft body parts require exceptional fossilization circumstances.
Squids consist mostly of soft body parts. The one exception is their hard, chitinous beak. Squid beaks that manage to survive on the fossil record of Earth's history would be vital for understanding how these fascinating cephalopods – a group of animals that includes octopuses, nautiluses, and cuttlefish – emerged and evolved over their 500 million years on this Earth.
Prior to this study, only one single fossilized squid beak had been found. Many small marine fossils, however, are deposited in jumbled assemblages that are difficult to extract and study.
To discover their remarkable beak assemblage, the researchers turned to a technique called grinding tomography. Basically, scientists gradually sand away a rock sample, thin layer by thin layer, imaging each layer in high resolution as they go.
The sample itself is destroyed. But the resulting images can then be compiled digitally to reveal the interior contents of the rock in three dimensions – including highly detailed, 3D reconstructions of the fossils therein, which usually would only be accessible in two-dimensional slices.
Ikegami and his colleagues used this technique to reconstruct a piece of fossil-riddled rock dating back to around 100 million years ago. Inside was a dense assemblage of animal remnants, including some 1,000 cephalopod beaks, among which the squid beaks emerged.
These beaks were tiny and thin, ranging in length from 1.23 to 19.32 millimeters, with an average length of 3.87 millimeters, about 6 percent of the size of the only previously known fossil squid beak. The minimum thickness of these beaks was always less than 10 micrometers, the scientists found.
"These results show that numerous squid beaks are hidden as millimeter-scaled microfossils and explain why they have been overlooked in previous studies," the scientists write in their paper.
Based on these results, the researchers inferred that the Cretaceous squid biomass would have far exceeded the biomasses of fishes and ammonites, and that squid diversification had absolutely exploded by around 100 million years ago.
This is in stark contrast to the previous assumption that squids only began to thrive on Earth after the mass extinction that brought about the end of the dinosaur age, some 66 million years ago.
"These findings change everything we thought we knew about marine ecosystems in the past," says paleontologist Yasuhiro Iba of Hokkaido University. "Squids were probably the pioneers of fast and intelligent swimmers that dominate the modern ocean."
The research has been published in Science.
Sea Slugs Steal Body Parts From Prey to Gain Their Powers
Earth Is Pulsing Beneath Africa Where The Crust Is Being Torn Apart
Strange Cellular Entity Challenges Very Definition of Life Itself
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Scientific American
08-08-2025
- Scientific American
Nature-Inspired Gel Explains Why This Duck Is Stuck
On the shores of a beach in northern Japan, waves pummel a rubber duck stubbornly stuck to a rock. Thanks to a new supersticky hydrogel lining its base, the toy won't budge. Hydrogels are soft, jellylike materials used in many fields. In medicine, they can dress wounds and deliver drugs. In agriculture, they can help soil hold more water. But making substances sticky is tough—and underwater, it's even tougher. The glues typically don't hold well under a wet and salty surf. Nature, however, has a solution. Creatures such as barnacles and mussels naturally produce proteins that let them stick to wet surfaces. Inspired by these adhesive abilities, researchers combed through catalogs of these animals' protein structures to mimic their stickiest features. Then, the scientists incorporated these protein structures into the hydrogels and tested them. After running several experiments, the team fed the results to a machine-learning system so that it could design a hydrogel with even stronger glue. The system came up with three superadhesive designs, composed of different protein structures, which the researchers described this week in Nature. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Jonathan Barnes, a polymer scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the study, was impressed by the sheer strength of the enhanced hydrogels. In one experiment, the researchers used one of the gels to glue together pairs of plates made of one of three different materials—ceramic, glass and titanium—in a tank of saline. Each glued pair had a kilogram-mass load suspended below it. The gel held on for more than a year. 'To last for a year is incredible,' Barnes says. All three of the artificial-intelligence-designed hydrogels showed similar strength in artificial seawater. But one outperformed the others when tested in deionized water, which is devoid of charge and not found in nature. The differences in strength show that some adhesive materials may be more equipped for specific environments than others. 'We are now working to tune this difference and test them in different conditions,' says study co-author Jian Ping Gong, a polymer scientist at Hokkaido University in Japan. 'We also want to improve and [find] other formulations that can work on metal, for example.' After synthesizing the ultrasticky gels, the scientists took two of them into the field to test their real-world capabilities. The researchers used one gel to seal a hole at the base of a three-meter-long pipe that was filled with tap water to simulate a high-pressure water leak. And they used the other to affix a rubber duck onto a rock to see how well the technology fared in seawater. One day these gels could help researchers develop artificial skin or repair underwater and offshore structures. '[The study] points to tougher, faster and more reliable wet adhesives—for medical sealing, marine infrastructure and emergency repairs,' says Ximin He, a materials scientist who studies biologically inspired materials at the University of California, Los Angeles, and was not involved in the paper. 'The data‑driven playbook they use could shorten the path from idea to material across many applications that affect daily life.'
Miami Herald
07-08-2025
- Miami Herald
Ancient creature with porcupine-like quills found in amber. It's a new species
Fossils offer the opportunity to look at an era of time permanently frozen in stone. Dinosaurs swallowed by mud or plants pressed into the ground over millions of years create imprints of a world long extinct. Another material, however, allows researchers in the modern day to see a specific moment in time, from an insect stuck in flight to a creature's last breath still captured in a bubble. That material is amber and it's created when gloopy, sticky tree resin hardens over millennia. In Myanmar, amber has been discovered throughout the Kachin State — including one piece with a new species hidden inside. The amber was discovered and sold into trade in 2014, before political conflict surrounded the amber mines, and later moved to a lab at Capital Normal University in Beijing, according to a study published Aug. 4 in the peer-reviewed journal Fossil Record. The piece was trimmed and polished, providing a window to the animal caught inside, according to the study. The new species is a mite and it represents the first species in a new genus, researchers said. The amber dates to the Cretaceous period about 98 million years ago, according to the study. The mite looks like something you might find today, except for one key feature. The critter has 'ultra-long' dorsal setae, or hair-like structures that cover the back of the body, according to the study. 'The dorsal setae of Cretachyzeria macroseta (a new genus and species) are extremely long and dense, resembling the quills of a porcupine,' researchers said. 'This unusual morphological structure likely served specific biological functions.' In modern mites, small hair-like features on the body are used to provide shelter to their larvae, making it easier for them to transport and disperse the larvae, according to the study. The prehistoric mite may have used them for the same purpose, or at least for protection as the specimen trapped in amber is covered with small grains of sand or earth. 'This suggests that the ultra-long setae may provide some protection from impurities, safeguarding the fragile abdomen. This feature would enhance the survival of the mite inhabiting tree or soil environments,' researchers said. The scientists also hypothesized that the mite might have been red in color, which would have made it less likely to be eaten by predatory insects or spiders, according to the study. The long setae could have also made it hard for predators to grab on to the small critter. 'The discovery of a new species in Cretaceous Myanmar amber suggests that this feature was already present 99 million years ago,' researchers said, also suggesting this mite group 'evolved at a slow rate and that its ancestral traits have remained relatively unchanged from those (living) species.' Kachin State is in northern Myanmar, along the border with China. The research team includes Yu Liu, Qing-Hai Fan and Dong Ren.
Yahoo
31-07-2025
- Yahoo
Bone-Eating Worms Have Lurked in The Ocean For 100 Million Years
Not content with a diet of old leaves, some worm species actually eat bones. A new study has now traced the ancient ancestors of these bone-burrowers back through 100 million years of evolution. Deep in the ocean, bone-eating worms from the genus Osedax feast on the carcasses of whales, sucking up fats and proteins from the skeletons. And it looks like they've been doing so for a while now. By scanning fossils to look for traces of bone-eating behavior, researchers from University College London (UCL) and the Natural History Museum in the UK have been able to identify seven new types of worm from the Cretaceous period. There would've been no whale on the menu at that time, but traces left behind by these worms were found in fossils of mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs, and plesiosaurs: the dominant marine reptiles of the time, now on show in museum exhibits. Related: "We haven't found anything else that makes a similar burrow to these animals," says paleontologist Sarah Jamison-Todd, from UCL. "As the ancient bores are so similar to modern Osedax species, and we don't have body fossils to contradict us, we assume that they were made by the same or a similar organism." "It shows that the bone-eating worms are part of a lineage that stretches back at least to the Cretaceous, and perhaps further. We can see how the diversity of bone-eating worms changes across millions of years." The team was able to build 3D models of 130 fossils without damaging them, through the use of computed tomography (CT) scans. Six fossils showed signs of burrows. That then led to the identification of seven new ichnospecies – species categorized based on traces in fossils, rather than direct remains of the creatures. Some of the boring patterns matched modern-day species, suggesting a surprising level of evolutionary stability across many millions of years. The researchers also used microscopic fragments around the fossils to date the bones and the worms that chewed through them. That placed them at at least 100 million years ago, meaning these creatures evolved much earlier than previously thought. "By using the remains of small organisms that make up the chalk itself, we were able to date the fossils to more precise time slices of the Cretaceous period," says Marc Jones, paleontologist at the Natural History Museum. There are plenty of other discoveries like this still waiting to be made, the researchers suggest – which could happen through further scans of ancient fossils as well as studies of the modern species living in the oceans today. Additional work looking at the genetics of the organisms living today could tell us more about the evolutionary history of these tiny creatures, though researchers will have to collect more samples and more data first. "There are many more examples of boring that haven't yet been named from both ancient and modern bone-eating worms," says Jamison-Todd. "In fact, some bores from the Cretaceous appear to be similar to ones that are still made today." "Finding out whether these burrows are made by the same species, or are an example of convergent evolution, will give us a much better idea of how these animals have evolved, and how they have shaped marine ecosystems over millions of years." The research has been published in PLOS ONE. Related News Ancient Voice Box Finally Reveals How Dinosaurs May Have Sounded Stunning Grand Canyon Fossils Reveal Evolution's Weird Experiments Neither Scales Nor Feathers: Bizarre Appendage Discovered on Reptile Fossil Solve the daily Crossword
