One Chunky Belemnite: Wyoteuthis linsterorum

Publication Info:

Transcript:

Alexey P. Ippolitov et al. 2026. ‘The big chunky belemnite’: a new relict megateuthidid from the Oxfordian (Late Jurassic) of Wyoming, USA, and its place in the evolutionary history of the group. Papers in Palaeontology12 (5): e70123; doi: 10.1002/spp2.70123

Meet Wyoteuthis linsterorum! The new, extra chunky belemnite from Jurassic Wyoming. And "extra chunky" isn't an exaggeration, the rostrum of this belemnite is literally the widest ever discovered.
This squid relative also belonged to a family that was thought to have been extinct for 20 MILLION years before Wyoteuthis lived!

Episode 357

Notes:

The chunkiest belemnite ever was just discovered. So, if you've ever been fossil hunting and found a fossil that looks like this, you've probably found a belemnite, whether you realize it or not. This is the rostrum. It's kind of the equivalent of the pen or cuttlebone and its close relative, squid or cuttlefish. Despite how often their fossils get kind of overlooked because they're relatively common, these animals were really cool. They're basically like halfway between a squid and a cuttlefish with 10 arms completely lined with fish hooks, anywhere from 100 to 800 of these hooks per animal. Anyway, this is the belemnite rostrum you're probably used to see, but this is the rostrum of Wyoteuthis linsterorum, the brand new extra thick Jurassic belemnite from, as you can probably guess by the name, Wyoming. And at 4 in long, this rostrum is a whopping 2.4 in wide, making it the widest belemnite ever discovered relative to length, obviously. And that's not all, because Wio toothis has got placed in the family Megateuthididae, a family that until this moment was thought to have gone extinct 20 million years earlier. And in case you're wondering if this could just be a one-off, a mutation, just one extra thick belemnite, uh luckily, they found two. As usual, if you want more information, here's the source.