More Lebanese soft bodies

[Hajar]

Hi cuttlegirl, it's about 10 cm long and has shown all the repertoire of colours (including the neon blue line) and textures (smooth to covered in tubercles) that I've seen in the wild ones here so I'd guess Sepia pharaonis.

 

[DWhatley]

but since there was a cuttlefish I brought that home too

It took awhile ... I hope you will start a journal with this one.

 

[Hajar]

I did! Here's a picture of an eye which I find fascinating. It's a very photogenic animal, now named "Ramses". The eye of the laterally-preserved coleoid shown above is also remarkable and I'll take a close-up of that a little later.

 

[Hajar]

A couple of Cretaceous eyes.

 

[Architeuthoceras]

Do I see Eyelashes on that top fossil

 

[Hajar]

Now that would be a discovery (paper in Nature?)!

 

[tonmo]

Stuck & tweeted. Thanks Hajar!

 

[Terri]

Congrats for being "stuck and tweeted" Hajar! Not so long ago I don't think that would have been thought a good thing to happen!

 

[DWhatley]

I got tweeted but not stuck for the first time not too long ago. It didn't hurt a bit.

 

[Architeuthoceras]

If not eyelashes... Is it possible that is a mold of the radula and not the eye?

I just threw some lines on that pic, they just follow some of the lineation I am seeing...

Another explanation?

 

[cuttlegirl]

Could it be extraocular muscles? Cephalopods have up to 14 ocular muscles that help them move their eyeball and to focus.

The Oculomotor System of Decapod Cephalopods: Eye Muscles, Eye Muscle Nerves, and the Oculomotor Neurons in the Central Nervous System on JSTOR

Biodidac has a nice illustration of a cephalopod eye. I registered with them before posting here (per their request).
http://biodidac.bio.uottawa.ca/thumbnails/filedet.htm?File_name=ceph005b&File_type=cdr

 

[bathypol]

These fossils are gorgeous. Amazing work you're doing

 

[Hajar]

Thanks Bathypol, but this is definitely play for me and not work! I suspect though that professionals working on material like this (Dirk Fuchs and colleagues) also find a lot of pleasure in their job - with this kind of preservation it becomes so easy to visualise the living animals.

I'm with cuttlegirl on her interpretation of muscles in the eye capsule (we're tongue-in-cheek on the "eyelashes"). The structures are actually mostly concentric and there's an irregular edge to the flake preserving a "shallower" portion of the fossil. I'll make a more detailed drawing a little later this evening.

 

[Hajar]

Here's a beautifully preserved published specimen showing the eye capsules, the holotype of Glyphiteuthis abisaadiorum (Fuchs & Weis 2009).

 

[Architeuthoceras]

Thanks for that picture Hajar! A pair beats an ace every time.