Latest news with #ShinIkegami
BBC News
01-07-2025
- Science
- BBC News
Squid dominated oceans millions of years ago scientists say
When did squid first appear in our oceans and how did the evolve? That's a question that has puzzled scientists for many a team of researchers in Japan think they might have discovered the developed a new technique to scan fossils, allowing them to look at rocks in 3D their surprise, this helped them find more than 1,000 beaks of ancient cephalopods, suggesting that the animals dominated oceans millions of years ago. What are Cephalopods? Cephalopods - a group of marine animals which include squid - have been swimming in our oceans for millions of years. However, not much is known about ancient squid, as they are rarely preserved. This is because they are soft-bodied and don't have hard shells, meaning they rarely turn into fossils.A team of international scientists, led by experts at Hokkaido University in Japan, developed a new advanced technique to scan allowed them identify one thousand fossilised cephalopod beaks hidden inside rocks, which dated back to the late Cretaceous these small beaks were 263 squid specimens, including about 40 different types that had never been seen surprised scientists was how common squids were in ancient oceans. The team found that squid fossils were far greater in number than those of other bony fish and ammonites. Author of the study, Dr Shin Ikegami, from Hokkaido University explained: "In both number and size, these ancient squids clearly prevailed the seas."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," he team hope that their new technique could help us better understand ancient marine ecosystems.
Yahoo
26-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
100-Million-Year-Old Rock Reveals 40 Never-Before-Seen Squid Species
The high seas of the dinosaur era were teeming with a plethora of squids, a new study has found. 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
