This Vampire Squid Lived 328 Million Years Ago
Related to octopuses and squids, vampire squids are strange, sinister-looking creatures that hide in the deep sea where there is hardly any oxygen. A sort of cloak stretches across its eight arms, and when threatened, they turn inside out. Despite their ghastly appearance, they are soft-bodied, passive creatures that feed on carrion, detritus, and snot. Now, a team from the American Museum of Natural History and Yale University has discovered the oldest ancestor of these animals, a new species of vampire that lived 328 million years ago and, instead of eight tentacles like its modern descendants, I was ten. The details are published this Tuesday in the magazine ‘Nature Communications’.
“This is the first and only known vampire that has ten functional appendages,” says Christopher Whalen, a researcher in Yale’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Because these animals lack hard structures, they are not well represented in the fossil record. But the new study is based on an exceptionally well-preserved vampiropod fossil from the collections of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and originally discovered in what is now Montana.
The researchers identified the specimen as an entirely new genus and species dating to about 328 million years, making it the oldest known vampire and extending the group’s fossil record by about 82 million years. In the new study, they also describe its ten arms, all with preserved suckers.
“Arm count is one of the defining characteristics that separate the ten-arm line of squid and cuttlefish ( Decabrachia ) from the eight-arm line of octopus and vampire squid (Vampyropoda). Scientists have long known that octopuses reach the eight-arm count by removing the vampire squid’s two filaments and that these filaments are vestigial arms,” explains Whalen. “However, all previously reported fossil vampiropods that preserve appendages only have eight arms, so this fossil is possibly the first confirmation of the idea that all cephalopods ancestrally possessed ten arms,” he notes.
President Biden
Two of the cephalopod’s arms appear to have been elongated relative to the other eight arms, and its torpedo-shaped body is reminiscent of today’s squad. The fossil was named Syllipsimopodi Biden. The generic name means ‘prehensile foot’ because this is the oldest cephalopod known to develop suckers, which allow the arms to better function for grasping prey and other objects. And the species’ name is to honor the current President of the United States, Joseph R. Biden.
” Syllipsimopodi may have filled a niche more similar to extant squids, a mid-level aquatic predator,” says Landman. “It’s not inconceivable that it could have used its sucker-laden arms to pull small ammonoids out of their shells or venture closer to shore to hunt brachiopods, bivalves, or other shelled marine animals,” he adds.
