Researchers have show that ink sacs from a cephalopod that live 160 - million long time ago still take tincture of the paint melanin . That ’s an impressive uncovering in its own right , but what really floored the scientist was how familiar these pigments appear .
Pictured below are the fossilised ink sacs ( labeled “ A ” and “ B ” ) , and the traces of pigment contained therein ( pronounce “ D ” and “ E , ” respectively ) . When the researchers compared the pigment structures regain in the two Sac with those plant in the ink of modern - day cuttlefishSepia officinalis(labeled “ hundred ” ) , the researchers found they were almost identical . cephalopod , it would seem , know how to keep a good affair perish .
“ It ’s close enough that I would argue that the pigmentation in this class of animals has not evolved in 160 million years , ” said John Simon , one of the lead researchers on the subject , in a prepared release . “ The whole machinery plainly has been locked in time and passed down through succeeding generation of cuttlefish . It ’s a very optimized system of rules for this animal and has been optimized for a retentive time . ”
The team ’s findings are relevant to a form of paleontological fields , including emerging domains of enquiry that bank on the analysis of ancient paint structures todetermine the color of feather on ancient dinosaur . Understanding what these creatures looked like — or , in the case of cephalopods , what they were capable of jettison from their ink sacs — can tell us a lot about how they endure .
https://gizmodo.com/this-four-winged-dinosaur-is-helping-rewrite-the-book-o-5891617
The researchers ’ finding are published in the latest upshot ofPNAS .
cephalopodsChemistryOctopusesPaleontologyScienceSquid
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