Artists impression of Wyoteuthis linsterorum
Jasom C Poole.
Some 160 million years ago, a peculiar, thick-bodied relative of modern squid inhabited the sea that covered parts of what is now Wyoming. That alone places it inconveniently far outside the few thousand years allowed by a literal reading of Genesis. Now, two rare fossils have revealed that this animal was also a late-surviving representative of an ancient belemnite lineage — another small but revealing piece of an evolutionary history that creationism requires its followers to deny.
The newly described species, Wyoteuthis linsterorum, is the subject of a paper in Papers in Palaeontology. Although the headline calls it a Jurassic squid, it was a belemnite: a member of an extinct group of squid-like cephalopods. Its most striking feature was its exceptionally broad internal shell component, known as the rostrum or guard. Where familiar belemnite guards resemble slender bullets, these specimens are unusually stout, earning their owner the distinction of having the thickest known belemnite guards.
The fossils come from the Sundance Formation and date to the Oxfordian stage of the Late Jurassic. Examination of their external features and CT scans of their interiors led the researchers to assign the animal to the Megateuthididae, a family that had largely disappeared earlier in the Jurassic. Rather than representing a newly created form appearing from nowhere, Wyoteuthis appears to have been a surviving offshoot of an older evolutionary lineage, persisting in a regional refuge after its relatives had declined elsewhere.
For young-Earth creationism, the chronological problem is straightforward. An animal living approximately 160 million years ago cannot be accommodated within a universe supposedly created just 6,000–10,000 years ago. Nor does calling its remains a product of Noah’s Flood explain away the geological succession in which they occur. The problem is not merely the existence of a marine fossil on dry land, but its place within an ordered history of changing environments and successive assemblages of organisms.
There is also a less decisive, but still awkward, question for believers in an intelligent, omniscient creator: why deliberately create species in the full knowledge that they will become extinct? Extinction presents no conceptual difficulty for evolution. Natural selection favours reproductive success under prevailing conditions; it neither anticipates future changes nor guarantees permanent survival. An organism can be well adapted to its environment without being equipped for every environment that might follow.
An omniscient designer, by contrast, cannot be surprised by the eventual disappearance of its creations. Their extinction must either have been intended or knowingly permitted. Believers can, of course, invoke an undisclosed divine purpose, but that supplies no testable explanation. Here, as elsewhere in palaeontology, evolutionary history provides the productive framework: descent, diversification, regional survival and eventual extinction, with no supernatural intervention required.
Belemnites^ ancient sea creatures in a gravel path. As a child in north Oxfordshire, UK, I often had a handful of belemnite fragments in my pocket, picked out of the gravel used to surface paths. Those small objects were remnants of animals that inhabited ancient seas millions of years before humans existed. If I were very lucky, I would find a larger fragment with the pointed end intact. The older folk called them 'thunder bolts', apparently the origin of the phrase. Their abundance raises an interesting question: why do we find so many pieces of these particular animals?The report in Papers in Palaeontology, the journal of the Palaeontological Association, was accompanied by a news report from The University of Manchester:
What were belemnites?
Belemnites were extinct marine cephalopods, related to living squid and cuttlefish. They flourished during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, and the last disappeared about 66 million years ago. They were swimming predators with squid-like bodies and ten arms bearing small hooks for grasping prey.
The familiar bullet-shaped fossil is not the whole animal, a tooth or an external shell. It is the rostrum, commonly called the guard: a substantial component of the internal shell at the rear of the body. It probably helped counterbalance the head and arms during swimming.
Why do their fossils survive so well?
The guard was made of dense calcite. Its robust construction gave it a much better chance of surviving burial and subsequent geological changes than the animal’s soft tissues. Belemnites were also widespread and locally numerous, so successive generations supplied many guards to the sea floor.
Another part of the internal shell, the chambered phragmocone, was made of aragonite, a different form of calcium carbonate that is generally less stable during fossilisation. It often disappeared while the calcitic guard survived. A conical cavity at the broader end of a fossil guard can mark where the phragmocone once fitted.
This is an example of preservation bias: the fossil record disproportionately preserves durable structures. A collection of guards tells us much more about the animals’ hard internal parts than about their original soft-bodied appearance.
Why are so many specimens broken?
Durable does not mean indestructible. Guards can fracture during burial, deformation of the surrounding rock, weathering, transport or quarrying. Broken specimens may reveal calcite crystals radiating outwards from the central axis, sometimes accompanied by concentric growth layers. These internal patterns can help distinguish a belemnite fragment from an ordinary pebble.
From a Jurassic sea to an Oxfordshire path
River gravel is a plausible source for those childhood finds, although the source cannot be established from memory alone. Oxfordshire’s river-terrace gravels commonly contain material eroded from Jurassic rocks. Weathering can release fossils from their original beds, after which rivers transport and redeposit them alongside stones and other debris.
This is called reworking. The fossil remains Jurassic even when the gravel containing it is much younger. Gravel subsequently extracted for paths can therefore bring together objects with very different geological histories. Alternatively, path surfacing may consist of crushed quarried rock or aggregate brought from elsewhere.
A handful of belemnite fragments can thus represent several stages in a long history: life in an ancient sea, burial and fossilisation, erosion, transport and eventual collection by an inquisitive child. Their commonplace appearance conceals a timescale wholly incompatible with a world only a few thousand years old.
“Peculiar” new species of Jurassic squid found in Wyoming
- Researchers have identified a new species of Jurassic squid-like animal from 160-million-year-old fossils
- CT scanning showed it belongs to an ancient branch of belemnites thought to have disappeared much earlier, making the discovery exceptionally rare.
- The new species, Wyoteuthis linsterorum, is the "chunkiest" belemnite ever found, with a skeleton far broader than any previously known.
A “peculiar” new species of Jurassic squid-like animal has been unearthed in Wyoming, USA, following the discovery of two exceptionally rare fossils dating back around 160 million years.
The newly named species, Wyoteuthis linsterorum, has been identified as a type of ancient cephalopod, called a belemnite, cousins of modern squid and octopus. They say unusually thick, barrel-shaped skeleton makes it the "chunkiest” or “fattest" belemnite ever discovered.
An international team of researchers from the USA, UK and New Zealand, including Dr Dean Lomax, Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Manchester, describe the discovery in the journal Papers in Palaeontology today.
Belemnites are among the most common fossils found worldwide and are recognised by their bullet-shaped remains, known as a rostrum or guard. Millions have been discovered in Wyoming's Sundance Formation, an ancient inland sea that once covered the western USA.
Co-author and Wyoming palaeontologist, Jessica Lippincott, said in Wyoming, they are nicknamed “squid butts”.
The chunkiest belemnite ever discovered
Most Wyoming belemnites are bullet-shaped measuring around 5 to 10 centimetres long and only 1 to 2 centimetres wide. By contrast, the newly discovered species had an unusually broad, barrel-shaped rostrum around 10 centimetres long but up to six centimetres wide, making it the thickest belemnite ever recorded.
Researchers estimate the living animal would have reached around 60 centimetres in total length including its arms.
The work was instigated by Wyoming palaeontologist and co-author Bill Wahl, who has spent much of his career searching for fossils in Wyoming and said this belemnite “stuck out like a sore thumb”. He brought together an international team of researchers to investigate the remarkable specimens, including belemnite expert Alexey Ippolitov, now at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
Using computed tomography (CT) scanning, the team were able to examine the fossils without damaging them, revealing internal features that confirmed the animal belonged to an ancient family of belemnites previously thought to have disappeared millions of years earlier.
PhD student, Ippolitov said he was "deeply surprised" to discover a fossil from such a well-studied group that differed so radically from anything previously known. After more than 200 years of palaeontological research on belemnites, he said, discoveries like this are exceptionally rare.
A possible explanation is that their relatively large size gave them an advantage when hunting co-occurring smaller belemnites of the genus Pachyteuthis. Modern squid, after all, are hardly picky when it comes to prey: they readily hunt not only other species of cephalopods, but sometimes even their own kind.
Alexey P. Ippolitov, first author.
School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences
Victoria University of Wellington | Te Herenga Waka
Wellington, New Zealand.
30 years in the making
The discovery was almost 30 years in the making. The first specimen was unearthed in the late 1990s by Dr Burkhard Pohl, founder of the Wyoming Dinosaur Center, after he spotted a belemnite much bigger than any he had seen before. The fossil sat unstudied in the museum's collection draw for many years until a second specimen was discovered by fossil collector Cliff Linster near Ten Sleep, Wyoming, and donated to the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in 2019. Together, the two fossils provided the evidence needed to identify and formally describe the new species.
Honouring a fossil collector's legacy
Wyoteuthis linsterorum paratype and holotype with scale bar.
Photo of Wyoteuthis linsterorum holotype on left, paratype on right.
Wyoteuthis linsterorum paratype with common Pachyteuthis example for size comparisonPhotos: © Jessica Lippincott
The name Wyoteuthis translates to “a squid from Wyoming”, while the species name, linsterorum, honours Cliff Linster and his family. Cliff discovered one of only two known specimens of the new species and donated it for scientific study.
After spending years fossil hunting in Wyoming and collecting countless fossils of the common Pachyteuthis belemnites here in Wyoming, this one is unlike anything I have ever seen! It goes to show that we are still finding new species of fossils all the time, and people who rockhound or collect invertebrate fossils can also contribute to science.
Jessica L. Lippincott, co-author.
Wyoming Dinosaurium Project
Cody, Wyoming, USA.
Cliff Linster passed away in June this year. He knew researchers were studying his remarkable discovery and was excited to see it formally described. The Linster family are no strangers to finding amazing fossils, perhaps most famously the dinosaur Bambiraptor.
Co-author and British palaeontologist, Dr Dean Lomax, an Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Manchester and an 1851 Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, in the UK, dug up dinosaurs with Cliff and his wife, Sandy, when he was a teenager.
I met Cliff and Sandy in 2009, when I spent a week digging up a dinosaur bonebed on their property in northern Montana. I have fond memories of that dig, listening to Cliff share his passion for fossils, including this belemnite. I’m honoured to help name this fossil after Cliff. It’s bittersweet that he didn’t get to see it published, but it’s wonderful that we can immortalise him and his family name in the history of palaeontology. The find is incredibly rare, which might be due to some ecological adaptations to the environment at the time. Perhaps its rarity is a result of narrow specialization.
Dr Dean R. Lomax, corresponding author.
Palaeobiology Research Group
School of Earth Sciences
University of Bristol
Bristol, UK.
Dr Lomax is also the author of the recently published book, “The Secret Lives of Dinosaurs”, which highlights Wyoming fossils, and he has spent time collecting fossils and excavating plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs in Wyoming’s Sundance Formation.
Both specimens are on display at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis, Wyoming USA.
Publication:
Wyoteuthis linsterorum adds another detail to the history of life that palaeontologists are steadily reconstructing: an unusual belemnite surviving in the Jurassic seas as a late representative of an older lineage. Its significance emerges from comparisons with related fossils, its anatomical features and its position in the geological succession. Evolution provides the framework that makes those observations intelligible; invoking a supernatural designer contributes no additional explanatory power.
For young-Earth creationism, the principal difficulty remains the chronology. These animals were living approximately 160 million years ago, long before the supposed “Creation Week” of biblical literalism. The researchers did not set out to refute Genesis. They investigated two unusual fossils and, in doing so, added another piece of evidence to an ancient history that cannot be compressed into a few thousand years. Creationism’s problem is not a shortage of evidence, but its insistence that the evidence must accommodate a predetermined conclusion.
Extinction raises a different question for those who attribute every species to an omniscient designer. Evolution has no foresight and offers no guarantee of indefinite survival: a lineage can flourish for millions of years and nevertheless disappear. An all-knowing creator, however, would have foreseen that disappearance before creating the first individual. Why deliberately produce species destined for extinction? An appeal to mysterious purposes can protect the belief from contradiction, but it supplies neither a testable explanation nor a reason to prefer design over natural processes.
There is something especially telling about the familiarity of belemnite fossils. Evidence of this remote past is not confined to spectacular museum exhibits or discoveries in distant countries; fragments of it can turn up in the gravel of an ordinary path and find their way into a child’s pocket and spark an interest in fossils that would last a lifetime. The world has been preserving its history for far longer than humans have been inventing stories about its beginnings. Reading that history requires curiosity and evidence, rather than an obligation to make the rocks agree with a sacred text.
Advertisement
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
All titles available in paperback, hardcover, ebook for Kindle and audio format.
Prices correct at time of publication. for current prices.
No comments :
Post a Comment
Obscene, threatening or obnoxious messages, preaching, abuse and spam will be removed, as will anything by known Internet trolls and stalkers, by known sock-puppet accounts and anything not connected with the post,
A claim made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Remember: your opinion is not an established fact unless corroborated.