The Piranha, 150 million years old, is the oldest known fish that feeds on flesh

The oldest example of carnivorous fish has been identified. An ancient bony fish that lived about 150 million years ago had distinctive pointy teeth like the piranha of modern times. The teeth were able to tear the flesh of the bones of its prey. The researchers also found severely damaged bodies in the same limestone deposits in southern Germany, where this creature resembling a piranha was found. It is the oldest fish fossil eater ever discovered.

"We have other fish from the same locality with fins missing at their fins," said David Bellwood of James Cook University, Australia. "This is an amazing parallel with modern piranhas, which do not feed primarily on flesh but on the fins of other fish. It's a remarkably smart move as a fin, renewable resource. Feed on a fish and he died; nibble his fins and you'll have something to feed your future. "

Today, the oldest known eater fish – a marine piranha dating from 150 million years ago, when the dinosaurs were half – evolution and Archeopteryx was the only one. one of the first vertebrates with feathered wings. @jcu @CoralCoE https://t.co/ZJ8U1Qg5UD pic.twitter.com/IUrDz4QQjv – The Bellwood Lab (@bellwoodlab) October 18, 2018

The fish, Piranhamesodon pinnatomus, was discovered in 2016. It was buried in the same repository as the one that provided the Archeopteryx fossils, a kind of dinosaur that has long retained the first image of 39; known bird. The bony fish is now part of the world-renowned collections of the Eichstätt Jura-Museum.

A well preserved jaw badysis of the specimen shows that he had long sharp teeth like razors on the outside of the bone forming the roof of the mouth. The teeth were triangular, like the blade on the saw. They looked a lot like those of the modern piranha that can bite both the flesh and the fin.

"We were surprised to find that this fish had the teeth of a piranha. It comes from a group of fish (pycnodontidae) famous for their brittle teeth. But what was even more remarkable was that it was Jurbadic. Fish as we know them, bony fish, did not bite the flesh of other fish at the time, "said Martina Kölbl-Ebert of the Jura-Museum Eichstätt. "The sharks were able to bite into pieces of flesh, but over the course of history, bony fish have been feeding on invertebrates or have largely swallowed their prey. Biting pieces of flesh or fins was something that came a lot later. "

Today's piranhas live in freshwater, but the newly discovered fish swam in the oceans and existed at the end of the Jurbadic when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

" The new Discovery is the first record of a bony fish that bites the bite of other fish and, in addition, did it at sea, "said Bellwood. "So when the dinosaurs were walking on Earth and small dinosaurs were trying to fly with the pterosaurs, the fish were swimming around their feet and tearing the fins or the flesh."