The elusive lamia calamary wears its red flesh like a voluminous ness . Billowing in the depths , the animal ’s velvety exterior almost seems to cover some abstruse truth of the phantasmal creature , which says but in its choice of habitat — the sales pitch - black , O - starved layer of the ocean — that it would prefer to be left alone .
Now , a European team has sought to sympathise how the cephalopod has managed in such a hostile environment . They learn a rare , 30 - million - class sometime fossil of a vampire squid relative and potential root , Necroteuthis hungarica . The fossil was rediscover in 2019 , more than six decades after it was believed to have been demolish in a museum fire during the Hungarian Revolution . The team ’s findings werepublishedrecently in the Nature journal Communications Biology .
“ We were surprised that the specimen exists , as it ’s been considered lose for a long fourth dimension , ” study lead generator Martin Košťák , a palaeontologist at Charles University in Prague , said in an email . “ This was likely the most exciting moment . ”
A rare image of a vampire squid.Image: © 2010 Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
There are benefits to living in bleak environments like the one Vampyroteuthis infernalis now inhabits . For one , less life intend there are fewer predator seeking the creature out . There ’s also less competition for its food for thought source , which tend to be the “ maritime snow ” of constituent matter that drifts down from farther up in the ocean , as a team from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute discovered when they celebrate a living vampire calamary via their remotely operated submergible .
Using scanning electron microscopy and geochemical analysis , Košťák ’s squad managed to confirm the initial designation of the fossil as a vampire calamari , though a unlike genus and species from the red animal we know today . ( Technically , vampire squids are not squids at all . They ’re cephalopods , like calamary and octopuses , but they miss the couplet of long tentacle that truthful squids have . )
The dodo animal was slightly handsome than the modern , understructure - tenacious vampire calamari . look at the fossilized deposit ensconcing the ancient cephalopod , the team make up one’s mind that the creature was already inhabiting a modest - oxygen environs in the Oligocene epoch , some 30 million age ago . But , while inspect rocky layers outside of Budapest where the fossil was excavated , the research squad found fossil plankton that would thrive in shallow seas , a region today ’s vampire calamary ca n’t stand .
The specimen of the vampire squid’s ancestor, Necroteuthis hungarica.Image: Košťák et al. Communications Biology 2021 (Other)
Košťák say that though the ancient squid was already adapted to dispirited - oxygen conditions , it last in a much shallower ocean than its innovative relatives .
“ There is no grounds for when and where these lineages diverged , ” he said , noting there is “ too poor a fossil record book to say . ” But it ’s possible that today ’s vampire calamary coexist with its long - extinct relative . What is certain , Košťák read , is that “ the living lamia calamary is actually a ‘ living dodo , ’ a descendant of Jurassic cephalopods . ”
The squad indicate that the ancient calamari ’s adjustment could have helped the species endure aggregated extinctions that snuffed out other branch on the tree of aliveness , such as the ending - Cretaceous effect that visualise the death of non - avian dinosaurs . Being able to get by on less is certainly a bring home the bacon evolutionary scheme .
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