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A Shark Eat Squid Eat Lobster World

Started by Recusant, May 11, 2021, 09:26:10 AM

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Recusant

Though only one of those (the shark, possibly) was involved. I decided "Shark Eat Belemnite Eat Proeryon" was a bit arcane. A paper in the Swiss Journal of Palaeontology describes the fossilised remains of a couple of meals--an ancient cephalopod was feasting on a crustacean and got chomped by a large vertebrate predator.

The authors of the paper invented a word "pabulite" (Latin pabulum "food" + Greek lithos "stone") to describe this sort of fossil. (There are some who sniff at such hybrid formations; I'm not one of them.) Strangely, the second article below claims that the term already existed, while the paper clearly states that the authors are "suggesting" (i.e. coining) a new word.

"Fantastical Jurassic Fossil Shows Crustacean Eaten by Squid Eaten by Shark" | Science Alert

Quote

Image Credit: Klug et al., Swiss Journal of Palaeontology



Sometime in the early Jurassic, an ancient squid-like creature speared a yummy lobster-like crustacean with its many hooked tentacles. Just as it began to dig into its meal, the eater became the eaten.

A much larger predator swooped in, tore a chunk out of the squid's soft middle and dashed off, leaving the leftovers of this three-way feeding fest sinking slowly to the bottom.

Roughly 180 million years later, the fossilized scene has been discovered in a quarry in Germany, and after close analysis, archaeologists now think they've figured out who was at the top of the food chain.

According to experts, the extinct squid-like cephalopod, known as a belemnite, was most probably killed by an ancient crocodile, shark, or other large predatory fish.

Whatever it was, the predator didn't stick around to finish its meal, likely because cephalopods have tough rostra - beaks that are hard, pointed and difficult to digest.

This means the hunter probably wasn't an ichthyosaur, even though fossils of these extinct marine reptiles suggest they were particularly skilled at picking around the hard areas of belemnites. Their stomach contents only show the mega-hooks found on belemnite tentacles and no other hard structures.

Fossilized stomachs of marine crocodiles and predatory fish, on the other hand, suggest these creatures gobbled everything down, swallowing both the mega-hooks and the hard beaks of squid.

Yet eating the whole squid isn't necessarily a good thing. A fossilized shark, also found in Germany from the Jurassic, was found with a whole pile of belemnite beaks in its stomach, and experts say these hard structures likely caused the shark's death.

[Continues . . .]

"Fossil of ancient squid eating a crustacean while being eaten by an ancient shark" | Phys.org

QuoteA team of researchers has discovered a fossil they are describing as a leftover fall event in which one creature was in the process of eating another creature that was not consumed. In their paper published in the Swiss Journal of Palaeontology, the group describes the fossilized find and what it taught them about behavior between ancient cephalopods and vertebrate predators.

Over the course of many years, archeologists have unearthed fossils of creatures that were interacting at the time of their death—one such type of interaction involves a predator capturing prey. Prior researchers have called fossils of creatures just prior to being consumed "pabulites" (Latin for "leftovers.") In this new effort, the researchers studied an ancient crustacean pabulite that was about to be consumed by an ancient squid-like creature called a belemnite.

[Continues . . .]

I linked the open access paper above, but here it is again, with abstract (paragraph breaks added):

"Fossilized leftover falls as sources of palaeoecological data: a 'pabulite' comprising a crustacean, a belemnite and a vertebrate from the Early Jurassic Posidonia Shale" | Swiss Journal of Palaeontology

QuoteAbstract:

Especially in Lagerstätten with exceptionally preserved fossils, we can sometimes recognize fossilized remains of meals of animals. We suggest the term leftover fall for the event and the term pabulite for the fossilized meal when it never entered the digestive tract (difference to regurgitalites).

Usually, pabulites are incomplete organismal remains and show traces of the predation. Pabulites have a great potential to inform about predation as well as anatomical detail, which is invisible otherwise.

Here, we document a pabulite comprising the belemnite Passaloteuthis laevigata from the Toarcian of the Holzmaden region. Most of its soft parts are missing while the arm crown is one of the best preserved that is known. Its arms embrace an exuvia [here, collection of shell remains] of a crustacean. We suggest that the belemnite represents the remnant of the food of a predatory fish such as the shark Hybodus.
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