Octopus natural predators7/1/2023 ![]() ![]() This goes to show the importance of maintaining and exploring museum collections.” “I was not specifically searching for holes made by octopuses, so it was a great surprise. “I could not believe what I saw initially, but after cleaning and studying the specimens carefully, later on, we became convinced that these holes are the oldest evidence of predation by octopuses,” Klompmaker said. Klompmaker discovered the drilled shells in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York in October 2018. This shows the ability of these animals to drill their prey evolved early in the evolutionary history of Octopodoidea, a remarkable 25 million years earlier than was previously known. ![]() The team’s findings document the oldest recognized drill holes made by octopodoids, found in nearly 75 million-year-old bivalve shells from the Cretaceous period in South Dakota. Such holes have been documented from the fossil record up to 50 million years ago until now. “These holes provide a great opportunity to track their presence and behavior in deep time, even though their body fossils are absent,” Klompmaker said. These octopuses then inject a venom through the hole that paralyzes and relaxes the prey’s muscles to facilitate consumption. Unlike other modern cephalopods, octopodoids leave behind tiny oval-shaped drill holes in many shells of their molluscan and crustacean prey. As these soft-bodied cephalopods do not fossilize easily because they decay rapidly, only a single body fossil species from 95 million-year-old Cretaceous rocks in Lebanon is known. Octopuses from the Octopodoidea superfamily are a versatile group of marine predators comprising more than 200 species today. Neil Landman, curator emeritus of Fossil Invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History, detailed their findings in a recently published paper in Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. Adiel Klompmaker, curator of Paleontology at the Alabama Museum of Natural History, and Dr. The evidence consists of tiny holes drilled in the clams they preyed upon during the Cretaceous period about 75 million years ago.ĭr. – New research unveiled the earliest evidence of octopus predation in the fossil record. Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Email Two drilled specimens of the bivalve Nymphalucina occidentalis and close-ups of drill holes. ![]()
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