ecosystem<\/a> had been a mystery, Iba says.<\/p>\nA fresh look at old fossils<\/h2>\n
To find those details, Iba was part of a team that examined 15 fossil jaws. Found in Japan and Canada\u2019s Vancouver Island, they date to near the end of the age of dinosaurs.<\/p>\n
Iba\u2019s team took careful measurements. They also compared the mystery jaws to those from other species of octopus and squid. The team also found 12 jaw fossils embedded in rocks in Japan. Some were too fragile to dig out. So they examined them with a technique called digital fossil mining. It records fossils as detailed in 3-D digital images.<\/p>\n
To make these images, they ground down the rocks layer by layer. Each layer exposed a new bit of the fossils. The researchers then took photographs of each layer. Afterward, the team used these images \u2014 with some help from artificial intelligence<\/a> \u2014 to make digital models of the fossils.<\/p>\nResearchers once thought these 27 cephalopods belonged to five extinct species. But as Iba and his colleagues learned more about them, they divided them into just two. There was Nanaimoteuthis jeletzkyi<\/em> (Nuh-NY-moh-TOOTH-is Jeh-LETZ-skee-eye) and the much larger N. haggarti<\/em>. The new analyses suggest the behemoths were early finned octopuses.<\/p>\nThis group of deep-sea animals has webbing between their arms and flapping fins on the other end of their body. Finned octopuses still exist. One example is the dumbo octopus.<\/a> The ancient ones were much, much larger.<\/p>\n