BIG IS BEAUTIFUL

Scientists Find ‘Chunkiest’ Sea Creature in Landlocked State

It would have been nearly two feet long.

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Scientists have found a fossil so chunky that they think it’s a whole new species. A pair of exceptionally rare belemnite fossils from the Jurassic Period was found in Wyoming’s Sundance Formation, leading experts to determine they were a new species called Wyoteuthis linsterorum. Belemnites are a now-extinct order of squid-like animals that differ from today’s squid because they have a solid, bullet-shaped internal skeleton rather than a modern squid’s soft pen. The findings were published in Papers in Paleontology, which said that the fossils’ barrel-shaped bodies measured up to 2.3 inches across. Science Daily reports that this makes them the “fattest” belemnites ever found. The researchers think the full creature may have been nearly two feet long, and noted that the finding is particularly rare because the belemnite branch it belongs to disappeared millions of years before belemnite fossils that are still found relatively regularly.