May your Cephalopodmas be gibbous and bright!

And by bright, of course I mean bioluminescent and chromatophoric!  Here's a tentacular "gift" for you all!

I realize it's not much to look at now, but it's just one piece of a much larger project that I've been working on for a while (and hope to complete soon). Anyway, if there was ever a day to post it to the blog, Cephalopodmas would be that day. So here's to the cephalopods and the teuthologists who study them.  From the tiniest tainoceratid, to the largest lepidoteuthid, happy Cephalopodmas to all, and to all an inky night!

Squid!!!

I'll make this short, and simple, unlike the squid below does (don't worry, that will make sense in a minute). This is a mature male Onykia ingens, a deep-sea squid. This specimen was caught in deep-water by a research team on the Patagonian slope, and I'm estimating is around 7 - 8 meters in length from tip of the tentacle to tip of the fin. This isn't a new species, but researchers did learn something pretty spectacular about it recently. (Slightly graphic image after the jump.)

Photo by V. Laptikhovsky, from BBC Earth News.

(New) soft bodied cephalopods from the Cambrian.

Is it Cephalopodmas already?!?! No, but it sure feels like it. Today the journal Nature published an article describing a previously known species, Nectocaris pteryx, in an entirely new light. In their new paper, Martin R. Smith and Jean-Bernard Caron reinterpret Nectocaris based on the holotype and 91 additional (brand spanking new) specimens that help show where this peculiar Middle Cambrian critter belongs on the "Tree of Life".

Restoration of Nectocaris based on old evidence, by Ghedoghedo, from Wikimedia Commons.

My 15 minutes are up.

Anyone who has ever done a Google image search for Cooperoceras texanum (and yes, I realize that's not going to be a large group of people) will be familiar with the fact that there are virtually no images of Cooperoceras on the web. There were however, a few exceptions. And for a while there, the reconstruction I made of this animal was the first image that came up. As silly as it sounds, it was a serious point of pride for me. But GeoCities has officially crumbled, and with it, my old website has dissapeared. Which means the image has been burried in the interweb graveyard. But since Halloween is right around the corner, it seems appropriate to zombify the little cephalopod and bring it back from the dead! Here he is, for the handful of people that actully know Cooperoceras exists.

More on Cooperoceras texanum, Halloween, and other things coming soon!