One of the inauspicious things about becoming awell - preserve specimenis that it almost always imply dying under some middling feverish weather condition . Thebog bodiesof people who have either fallen or been dump into peat bogs can be so well preserved that they get mixed up with recent murder victims ( and call on out to be1,600 years erstwhile ) , while CT scans of museum specimens have let out Turducken point offrog - eating Pisces eating Pisces - wipe out frogs . Particularly spectacular fogy can sometimes do more than give a snapshot of ancient creatures ’ anatomy , sometimes unwrap clue about their life-style . One such gemstone was recently describe in theSwiss Journal of Palaeontology , which seems to suggest anancient calamari - similar creaturewas eat on a crustacean when it was itself predated on by a shark .
The unusual and magnificently insightful fogy has been name as a pabulite by the generator on the paper – a word intended to convey that while they caught the repast in action , none of the “ food ” actually made it as far as the predatory animal ’ tummy . Can you guess dying just before getting to take a insect bite out of a delicious doughnut ? Tragic stuff and nonsense . Fossils that bring out predation events where the target hasmade it into the digestive tractof their killer are call regurgitalites .
Usually , pabulites only have bits of the once - living creatures preserved in the fogy , mean fossilist are task with piecing together the picturefrom traces of the predation consequence . They ’re something of a halcyon egg for fossilist , as they exhibit in the most obvious direction potential what extinct species were feeding on when they range the Earth ( and its oceans ) millions of years before humankind ’s emergence .
This particular pabulite went a little further , being found to contain the belemnite ( a calamary - similar cephalopod)Passaloteuthis laevigatafrom either the Early or downhearted Jurassic period . Most of its soft parts are miss , but the animal ’s arm crown is report to be one of the substantially preserve ever found . The researchers say this finding is noteworthy because it could show the belemnite remains were leftover , drop off from the sassing of a predator . Evidently , it was a nourishing event all around , as within that magnificently preserved arm is an exuvia of a crustacean – mean the belemnite was credibly eat up when it was corrode . An exuvia is the cast - off or sloughed - off skin of an arthropod . Not quite the decadent feast one might trust for as their last repast .
It ’s potential that the belemnite was desolate by a predatory fish such as the ancient sharkHybodushauffianus . That mean that the belemnite was mere moments away from putting some of that odorous , mucky skin in its sassing when it was rudely disturb by becoming a snack itself , and we do n’t stand for thegood kind .
“ We suggest that this represents remains of a meal of a vertebrate piranha , possibly of the Early Jurassic sharkHybodus hauffianus , ” wrote the written report authors . “ This is remarkable , because it informs about the behaviour of a cephalopodan and a vertebrate marauder . "
“ to boot , we use this affair to premise the term remnant decline for such corpse of a meal and pabulite for the fossilized remains of which . Diverse pabulites have been reported before . They are worthful sources of palaeobiological information and merit more attention . ”
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