Meet the 19-meter Cretaceous kraken that swam with mosasaurs
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A giant, intelligent, belligerent cephelapod?
Well, I guess my nightmares were getting a little stale and predictable. A change is as good as a rest, right?
Well, I guess my nightmares were getting a little stale and predictable. A change is as good as a rest, right?
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I WANT TO SEE THIS CRITTER!!!!!
Where's a time machine when you really need one?
Where's a time machine when you really need one?
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Props for this outstanding analogy: "[O]ctopuses are essentially highly organized bags of water and muscle"!
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I had the exact opposite reaction.
I want nothing to do with something that might consider my pickup to be tempting prey.
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This "reverse 3D printing" analysis technique is brilliant!
Easy to understand in concept, but very clever. Even for terrestrial fossils, we're often limited by cautions about soft tissue or plant matter not being preserved. I hope these techniques are scalable and become widely available. Is it already? First I'd heard of it. Although it seems destructive, so there may be some fossils that are off limits.
Maybe I'm just in an impressionable and receptive mood this morning, but do they give awards for advances like this?
Easy to understand in concept, but very clever. Even for terrestrial fossils, we're often limited by cautions about soft tissue or plant matter not being preserved. I hope these techniques are scalable and become widely available. Is it already? First I'd heard of it. Although it seems destructive, so there may be some fossils that are off limits.
Maybe I'm just in an impressionable and receptive mood this morning, but do they give awards for advances like this?
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Unusual Arrangement of Bones at Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada
https://21sci-tech.com/Subscriptions/Winter-2011_ONLINE/Kraken.pdf
Triassic, but related.
https://21sci-tech.com/Subscriptions/Winter-2011_ONLINE/Kraken.pdf
Triassic, but related.
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Not being a native English speaker, I wonder if "arms race" is an intentional pun about octopus anatomy
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This article is timely; I was just mulling over the creation of a Sci-fi universe where humanity finally reaches the stars, only to discover that all other intelligent life is based on giant crabs and cephalopods (except for the outliers, like intelligent bacterial masses, intelligent fungi, and intelligent star systems).
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Have to do a life goal and push for "octopodes" as the plural. Etymologically consistent and fun to say.
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In the original paper (available on science.org following the DOI link at the end of the news) there's also a bunch of pictures of the beak, the rocks etc.
DL for convenience: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea6285
Great write up Jacek!!
DL for convenience: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea6285
Great write up Jacek!!
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Not especially novel. Various techniques, including mechanical grinding or laser ablation can be used for the substrate removal.
Rapid high-resolution volumetric imaging via laser ablation delayering and confocal imaging
doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-16519-2
2022
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YetAnotherAnonymousAppellation
Ars Praefectus
It's like a CT scan done with a grinder. Destructive sectioning like this has been around for quite a while (I believe biologists regularly shave thin slices to view under a microscope) -- I think the clever bit us using the sections to build a 3D printed replica.
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It’s an interesting choice to brand this as “Digital Fossil Mining,” in terms of the business of how science works. They could have just described the approach, but instead it became The Approach. I don’t object or criticize this choice, and would probably recommend doing it, but it is clearly a choice.
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Imagine the Peter Benchley novel, The Beast, but with this thing. 5 meters vs 18 meters.
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I'm pretty sure the fact that it's not merely damaging and potentially destructive (which is true for a lot of fossil preparation techniques), it's /completely/ destructive means it's not going to be a viable option in a lot of cases - once it's done, there's nothing else you can do with that specimen, it now only exists as the digitised data set. It's proven possible to revisit already prepared fossil specimens with newer techniques (typically newer imaging/scanning tech) and find new and often unexpected details; that's no longer possible once you've physically ground away the entire specimen.
And it's important to note that "damaging and potentially destructive" preparation of fossils historically has almost certainly resulted in masses of lost data regarding the soft tissue of prehistoric animals. Barring exceptional cases (things like lagerstatten, unusual marine sedimentation environments that produced things like the mudstone formations most famous for Lyme Regis, sudden burial events like the Burgess Shale), historically it almost never ocurred to people preparing fossil specimens that the various shadows and slight texture changes and the like surrounding the more obvious fossilised bones might actually be preserved soft tissue. Heck, never mind the soft tissue traces, even the bone itself was sometimes prepared away! More often the problem was things like fragile fossilised bone removed entirely from the surrounding matrix and then not stabilised sufficiently (or at all), leading to specimens literally crumbling into dust in museum vaults.
It's also worth noting that something like high-energy X-ray scans of the specimens might allow the same level of detail to be recovered non-destructively. The constraint there is normally the difficulty of getting access to such scans (this is the sort of process that needs something like a decent sized synchrotron to produce a sufficiently high energy beam), and the physical constraints on the volumes that can be scanned (typically quite small, a few tens of centimeters to a side). Even CAT scanning or regular X-ray imaging of fossils often runs into these issues - palaeontologists have been known to take specimens to vetinary colleges or zoos to make use of X-ray machines designed for large animals. But even in the worst case scenario, it may be considered a better option to simply chop up a large specimen so it can be scanned rather than to completely destroy it.
So yeah, this kind of processing of specimens is extremely unlikely to become common. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the process was used more as an exploratory and experimental thing than anything else - using specimens that were considered low enough value that such a destructive process could be excused, as well as testing the quality of the data that was recovered and the practicality of the whole thing. Getting such a high value result from this research was probably as much a stroke of luck as anything else.
And make no mistake: this is a very high value result, and specimens like the ones that were processed will now be considered far more important than they used to be. Unless this proves to be the only process that can usefully extract good data from them, it's unlikely that a whole lot more such specimens will suffer the same fate.
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I don't. I've eaten far too many plates of pulpo a la brasa to claim clean hands; Big Chungus would probably view me as a tapa. Given how intelligent and maybe sentient the cute little modern ones are, it might be justified.
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One of the many ways Peter Watts' Blindsight fucked my head up was that it radically expanded my understanding of all the possible ways intelligent life could be intelligent, and to the very disturbing notion that intelligence doesn't necessarily (or maybe even optimally) entail sentience and self-awareness. Watts seemed to conclude that sentience was a maladaptive trait of intelligence and that it would be selected against on a long enough timeline, which is weirdly disturbing. What if we got there and all those giant crabs and squid and bacterial masses were even more alien than their descriptions suggest?
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I wonder about this - what is the reasoning behind this octopus being an apex predator, that is, a predator that is not hunted by any other predators? As far as I understand, even the largest current octopi and giant squids are hunted by large vertebrates like whales and sharks. And the cephalopods rely on camoflage, ink and depth to avoid or escape their predators - it is not a "fair fight", physically they stand little chance against their vertebrate predators (and early depictions of giant squid fighting/killing sperm whales are regarded as outdated, as far as I know).
If this cretaceous kraken shared the oceans with mosasaurs and sharks, could it really maintain an apex predator status against such hunters?
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As happens when confronted with so utterly different and Bizarro ancient ecosytem, one's mind starts going and asks thinks like....
Q: How long did they live. Most octopi live a year...deep water ones longer. This one?
Q: What sort of caloric input would it take to grow to size?
Yikes....
Q: How long did they live. Most octopi live a year...deep water ones longer. This one?
Q: What sort of caloric input would it take to grow to size?
Yikes....
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Ahh, cephalopods, the blue-bloods of the animal kingdom!
EDIT Love how they evolved advanced brains, camera eyes and closed circulatory systems independently. Amazing animals, and this one scratches a certain fantasy-cephalopod itch in my brain! Love the technique for finding it too.
EDIT Love how they evolved advanced brains, camera eyes and closed circulatory systems independently. Amazing animals, and this one scratches a certain fantasy-cephalopod itch in my brain! Love the technique for finding it too.
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Screw recreating the mammoth - breeding these is a worthy goal for any mad geneticist funded by a Japanese fishing corp or restaurant chain.
What could possibly go wrong?
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Nothing could go wrong – we'd just need to resurrect some megalodons to keep the krakens in check, then some Livyatan melvillei to hunt down the megalodons, then T.rex equipped with a snorkel if L. melvillei gets out of hand, then…
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Absolutely nothing could go wrong by my lights. Any and all consequences would be "worth it" to bring this creature back! Need to watch it take down a yacht in a stormy sea at night, and wrestle a sperm whale.
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SuinusLatinus
Ars Tribunus Militum
That journal doesn't seem very credible. On the paper last page there's an ad to a paid "special report" from them with the "Why Global Warming Is A Scientific Fraud" subtitle
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