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A bullet - shape beast with luminous organs , eight arms and sucker affixation like a vampire calamary haunt Earth ’s ocean 165 million year ago , a fresh study has found .
Researchers in France let out the metal money while using forward-looking picture proficiency to re - analyze antecedently discovered fogy belonging to vampyromorpha — a group of mostly nonextant , devilfish - same animals that includes the living mysterious - sea lamia calamari ( Vampyroteuthis infernalis ) .
A hypothesized reconstruction of Vampyrofugiens atramentum.
Unlike vampire calamary , which are actually scavenger , the newly identify ancient fauna probably snatch live prey using its arms . It also possess a unique compounding of defensive feature — including radiate - in - the - dreary organ — accord to a study publish June 22 in the journalPapers in Palaeontology .
The researchers named the 3.2 - in - long ( 8 cm ) creatureVampyrofugiens atramentum . " Vampyrofugiens " combine the original Serbian word for vampire , " vampir , " with the Latin for fleeing , " fugiens " — make this animal the fleeing vampire .
By comparingV. atramentum ’s anatomy with aliveness species , the team infer that it survive in the opened sea and likely ate fish , crustacean and potentially smaller cephalopods , while it was probable prey to larger Pisces the Fishes and large cephalopods .
" It was both predator and prey , " study lead authorAlison Rowe , a doctoral candidate at the Palaeontology Research Center in Paris ( CR2P ) , told Live Science . The CR2P research lab is second by Sorbonne University , the French National Centre for Scientific Research and the National Museum of Natural account in Paris , where the fogey is held .
Related : True to their name , vampire calamary may have long lives
The new breakthrough helps disgorge light on the evolution of all coleoid cephalopods , which let in octopuses , squid and cuttle . While hundreds of coleoid species swim in the sea today , it is difficult to discover about their evolutionary history because their gentle bodies are rarely preserved in fogey .
V. atramentumcame from the La Voulte - sur - Rhône Lagerstätte fogey website in southwestern France , where the rapid replacement of soft tissues with iron - rich mineralspreserves Jurassic coleoids in 3D.
Rowe and her team used high - resolution X - rays and computer molding to wait inner specimens without break them and study their home organs in detail for the first time . " These are things that we could never have see before and it really does give us a whole fresh insight into not just the morphology and the anatomy , but when innovations come about , " she say .
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The researchers found that V. atramentum had several innovative features that separated it from known vampyromorphs , including orbicular structures interpreted as lucent variety meat and an ink sac . It could have used the lucent organs to put across by creating light signals in the dark ocean and also mime rude visible light from the control surface to hide from piranha , and the ink sac in all probability help it to escape those predators if notice .
The combination of bioluminescence and ink is present in some living animals , such as glass squid , but it has never been recorded in extinct coleoids . accord to the survey , the discovery of V. atramentum suggests the Middle Jurassic period ( 174 to 164 million years ago ) had a large variety of cephalopods than previously think .
" It ’s peculiar because it ’s father a number of anatomic features that we ’ve not seen to my knowledge in the fossil track record , " Rowe said .
