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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 carnivorous fish fossil ever discovered.
"We have other fish from the same locality with missing pieces of 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 on his fins and you have food for the future. "
Today, the first known flesh-eating fish – essentially a marine piranha dating back 150 million years, when dinosaurs were evolving and Archeopteryx was one of the earliest vertebrate-winged ones to feathers. @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 deposit as the one that provided the fossils of Archeopteryx, a kind of dinosaur that has long kept the first known bird image . The bony fish is now part of the world-renowned collections of the Eichstätt Jura-Museum.
An analysis of the well-preserved jaws of the specimen shows that he has long sharp teeth like razor blades on the outside of the bone, forming the roof of the mouth. The teeth are triangular, like the blade of the saw. They looked a lot like those of the modern piranha that can bite the flesh and the fin.
"We were stunned to see 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 Jurassic. 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 newly discovered fish swam in the oceans and existed at the end of the Jurassic, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
"The new discovery represents the first record of a bony fish that bites other fish and, at the same time, does it at sea," said Bellwood. "So when dinosaurs walked on Earth and small dinosaurs tried to fly with pterosaurs, the fish swam around their feet and tore their fins or flesh."
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