Ancient oceans were likely dominated by predatory squid, a new fossil-hunting technique suggested.
Soft-bodied creatures like squid leave few fossils, unlike their shelled relatives ammonites and belemnites, meaning little is known of their evolutionary history.
Japanese scientists scanned and digitized large chunks of rock from 100-million-year-old seabeds and found that they were full of fossilized squid beaks, suggesting that squid far outnumbered ammonites and bony fish, thought to be the dominant marine animals of the time, and were just as large.
Previously the oldest known squid fossils were 45 million years old, with some paleontologists believing they only arose after the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs.
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