Paleontologists recently examined a trove of fossilized beaks from octopuses that lived between 100 and 72 million years ago. Using the jaws, they estimated the size of the creatures. They found that N. haggarti stretched to about 60 feet long, longer than a city bus and surpassing the largest known giant squid by nearly 20 feet. That makes these ancient octopuses among the largest invertebrates to have ever lived.
The study, which was published Thursday in Science, also suggests that prehistoric vertebrate predators — such as sharks, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs — may have met their match in these spineless cephalopods.
“It challenges the common view of an ‘age of vertebrates’ in marine ecosystems,” says Yasuhiro Iba, a paleontologist at Hokkaido University in Japan and an author of the new paper. He thinks these octopuses used their massive size, flexible arms, and powerful bites to achieve apex predator status in the ancient ocean.
The new findings provide evolutionary insights into a group of animals that left few fossils behind. These soft-bodied critters lost their protective shells hundreds of millions of years ago and largely lack any other hard parts that easily fossilize.
However, ancient octopuses did leave one telltale trace in the fossil record: their parrot-like beaks. These structures are composed primarily of chitin, the same material that forms the exoskeletons of insects and crustaceans. In living species, the size of an octopus’s beak is often indicative of the rest of the animal’s dimensions, allowing paleontologists to reconstruct the size of an ancient cephalopod based only on the beak it left behind.
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