Origin and radiation of squids revealed by digital fossil-mining

2025/06/26 by Shin Ikegami, Yusuke Takeda, Jörg Mutterlose +1 · 1 voice · 6 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Environmental Science · #Biological dispersal #Biology #Biomass (ecology) #Cephalopods and Marine Biology #Cretaceous #Ecology #Ecosystem #Extinction (optical mineralogy) #Extinction event #Fossil Record #Geology #Ichthyology and Marine Biology #Marine animal studies overview #Paleontology

paper · doi:10.1126/science.adu6248

published in Science 388(6754), 1406-1409 (American Association for the Advancement of Science)

openalex publication_date 2025/06/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23

Abstract

The evolution of soft-bodied squids, which provide a major part of the biomass in modern oceans globally, is poorly understood owing to their patchy fossil record. We provide a comprehensive evolutionary history of squids through "digital fossil-mining" techniques, revealing a new lagerstätte. The more than 250 fossil beaks of 40 species show that squids originated and rapidly radiated by 100 million years ago. Our data suggest that the radical shift from heavily shelled, slowly moving cephalopods to soft-bodied forms did not result from the end-Cretaceous mass extinction (66 million years ago). Early squids had already formed large populations, and their biomass exceeded that of ammonites and fishes. They pioneered the modern-type marine ecosystem as intelligent, fast swimmers.

Citations

• Ammonoid Paleobiology: From anatomy to ecology
• A General Coefficient of Similarity and Some of Its Properties

Cited by

• Rapid mid-Cretaceous diversification of squid and cuttlefish preceded radiation into coastal niches
• Earliest octopuses were giant top predators in Cretaceous oceans
• The oldest sepioid cephalopod from the Cretaceous discovered by Digital fossil-mining with zero-shot learning AI. [europepmc]
• Rapid mid-Cretaceous diversification of squid and cuttlefish preceded radiation into coastal niches. [europepmc]

Discussions

• The squids was the "soft-bodied thing" Pluridens imelaki ate. Starting from the Cenomanian, squids started their numerical dominance over other forms of cephalopods. They became the sea-food for large [bsky, 22 points, 1 comments]

Related

• Squids radiated globally prior to the Cretaceous−Paleogene mass extinction
• Cephalopod origin and evolution: A congruent picture emerging from fossils, development and molecules
• Rapid mid-Cretaceous diversification of squid and cuttlefish preceded radiation into coastal niches
• Croonian Lecture, 1973 On buoyancy and the lives of modern and fossil cephalopods
• Cephalopod body size and macroecology through deep time