Many of you have probably seen this already. No doubt, you have said something like
This thing has teeth where a beak should be -- disquietingly human teeth, at that.
The picture is disturbing to say the least and will haunt my dreams. So is the picture real? Yes.
The species is Promachoteuthis sulcus recently described by Young, Vecchione, and Roper. The published figure is...
What you see is the oral view of the brachial and buccal crown. The supposed teeth are papillae on the lips of the buccal mass common in cephalopods (See below).
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thanks craig. the real question is though, can it be stopped?
I wish I hadn't seen this right before going to bed...that freaky lookin' mouth will haunt me tonight. Thanks.
"The supposed teeth are papillae on the lips of the buccal mass common in cephalopods."
So these "teeth" are just meaty lips and the beak is somewhere inside or maybe totally ripped from the specimen?
Shouldn't the post be called "Decapod Teeth"?
Plover, it has 8 short arms (octopod) and 2 long tentacles.
http://img225.imageshack.us/done.php?l=img225/2742/promachspcoral783523…
Plover,
You are right it is oegopsid squid and thus decapodiformes. Most early blog post across the web misidentified it as a octopus thus the title. Forgot to mention this in the post. Thanks for catching it!
I'm confused. I've seen pictures of beaks removed from the other Promachoteuthis specimens. They look like beaks. There is no description of the beak for this specimen (P. sulcus) - they stat that "The gladius and beaks were not removed from the squid for examination." Therefore, the beak is still there.
I'm not seeing it.
Mandrake,
The only thing I can think of is that it is withdrawn into the buccal mass. It is unclear to me too.
CR,
if you find out please post! It's bugging the heck out of me, and I don't have a teuthologist handy to ask if they do that a lot. (The squid, not the scientists.)
I've put a link to this post up at Linnaeus' Legacy.
Wow... With creatures like these, we don't need to explore space to find aliens - just hop in a submarine!