Octopuses up to 62 feet long were likely formidable predators about 100 million years ago, according to a study published in the journal Science. “With their large bodies, long arms, powerful jaws and advanced behavior, they represent what could be described as a real Cretaceous Kraken,” said study co-author Yasuhiro Iba, a paleontologist at Hokkaido University, to Reuters. The invertebrates would have “rivaled” and “possibly even preyed upon apex predators such as mosasaurs and plesiosaurs,” said The Guardian.
Though octopuses are some of Earth’s oldest animals, they are difficult to study because they lack hard external shells and thus have very few fossils. Iba and his fellow researchers studied the fossilized beaks of the animals, revealing two extinct species: Nanaimoteuthis jeletzkyi and Nanaimoteuthis haggarti. The beaks and jaws were used to deduce the size of the creatures — between 23 and 62 feet long — and their feeding habits.
Their jaws showed “signs of intensive wear, with patterns indicating that these animals were dismantling hard-shelled prey,” said Live Science (a sister site of The Week). They were also “ground down on one side by as much as 10% of their total size, based on reconstructions,” a “lopsided loss” that “suggests lateralized behavior, which is linked to being brainier.”
For “roughly the past 370 million years, marine ecosystems have been thought to be dominated by large vertebrate predators — first fishes and sharks, then marine reptiles and later whales,” said Iba. But this new research confirms that “giant invertebrates also functioned as apex predators in the Cretaceous sea.” |
