An artist's impression of a pterosaur trying and failing to snag a cephalopod from the ocean (Christian Klug)
Smithsonian.com has a story about a unique fossil find. About 150 million years ago, there was a hungry pterosaur looking for a meal. It saw an appetizing cephalopod and went for it. Unfortunately, we don't know if it ate that day, but we do know that this particular bit of calamari got away. The fossil cephalopod, of Plesioteuthis subovata, has an embedded tooth from what is most likely a Rhamphorhynchus muensteri. This composite fossil was discovered in 2012 from a limestone deposit in Bavaria, Germany. Read all the details in a paper in Scientific Reports.
Excavated in 2012 from a limestone formation in Bavaria, Germany, the specimen was photographed before disappearing into the collections at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. But last year, René Hoffmann, a paleontologist at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany, stumbled across the image, depicting what appeared to be a Plesioteuthis subovata cephalopod, a predecessor of today’s squids, octopuses and cuttlefish. The 11-inch-long creature, Hoffmann notes in an interview with the New York Times, was extremely well preserved, with its ink sac and fins still partially intact. But what struck him the most was the sharp-looking tooth protruding from just below the animal’s head.
Based on the size, shape and texture of the dentition, as well as its approximate age, Hoffmann and his colleagues argue that it probably belonged to a Rhamphorhynchus muensteri pterosaur with a hankering for seafood, reports John Pickrell for Science News.
