Gigantic ‘water vampire’ fossils found in northern China
- Discovery has helped provide a fuller picture of the evolutionary history of lampreys
- The bloodsucking aquatic creatures have been around for hundreds of millions of years, surviving mass extinction events
Scientists have found two unusually large prehistoric lampreys in northern China that have helped provide clues about the history of a species that has been around for more than 360 million years.
The jawless eel-like fish are sometimes known as “water vampires” because they attach themselves to their prey and suck their blood through a toothed, funnel-like mouth.
Scientists had previously been unsure how their prehistoric ancestors fed because of a lack of fossil evidence.
But researchers working at the Yanliao Biota – a major depository of Jurassic-era fossils on the borders of modern-day Inner Mongolia, Hebei and Liaoning provinces – have now uncovered two 160 million-year-old lampreys that have helped them fill in the gaps.
Researchers from China and France analysed the fossils – the largest of which was over 60cm (24 inches) long – and found that lampreys had already become predatory by the Jurassic period, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and had evolved enhanced feeding structures.
The fossils indicate that they were capable of eating flesh and could grow more than 10 times longer than the earliest lampreys.
“The innovations of their feeding biology had probably underlain their evolutionary increase of the body size and the ‘modernisation’ of their life-history mode during the Jurassic period,” the team from China’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology and the French National Museum of Natural History wrote in an article published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications on Wednesday.