Főzy István (Hungary)
Csillaghegy (actually translated, “Star Hill”) is a suburb within the northern a part of Budapest, the capital of Hungary. It’s residence to a waterfront promenade with beautiful views of the Danube and the elegant, cable-stayed Megyeri Bridge that crosses Szentendre Island.
The riverside is residence to kayak leases, eating places and classy bars. The moderately chilly, however nonetheless widespread Csillaghegy Tub and Swimming pool is situated on the other (western) fringe of the suburb. Subsequent to it, there may be the Forest Hill residential complicated. That is the place they discovered the vampire.
To begin with, we should reassure the reader: you haven’t began an article a few creature that prowls round Csillaghegy, surviving the day in a coffin, sucking human blood. No want for garlic, and no want for a crucifix.
The ominously named Necroteuthis (necros = useless physique, -teuthis = squid, Greek), the vampire from the Csillaghegy is nothing greater than an Oligocene fossil that gives a hyperlink between the vampire squids of 120 million years in the past and Vampyroteuthis infernalis (actually translated, “vampire squid from hell”), a deep sea creature that also lives at this time.
The whereabouts of the fossil, which was discovered and described about 80 years in the past, was unknown for a very long time, however lately Necroteuthis was rediscovered within the dusty museum drawers of the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest. The outcomes of a re-examination of the stays have been revealed within the scientific journal Communications Biology, a part of the celebrated Nature household of journals (Košťák, M. et al, 2021).
Within the Csillaghegy clay-pit, it was mainly the Oligocene (basically, Rupelian and Kattien, i.e. Late Kiscellian, in terms of the Central Paratethyan stratigraphy) Kiscell Clay that was exploited. This is a thick, pelagic and bathyal succession (up to nearly a thousand meters thick) of dark grey, bioturbated clay, which yielded a rich mollusc fauna and an extremely diverse foraminifer assemblage (Báldi, 1986). It represents roughly one million years within the NP 24 nannofossil zone (Tari G. et al, 1993). The sediment was deposited under normal marine conditions, in an estimated water depth of between 200 and 1,000 meters (Báldi, T., 1986).
However, in the Csillaghegy clay-pit, another Oligocene formation – the Tard Clay – also cropped out. It represents a younger rock succession compared to the Kiscell Clay; rather, it is Early Rupelian (Early Kiscellian) in age. In terms of nanoplankton zones, the bulk of the formation belongs to the NP 23 zone.
The formation consists of hard, grey clay and argillite, with white laminae composed by monospecific, calcareous nannofossils. The maximum 300m-thick Tard Clay was deposited in a stagnant, restricted basin under anoxic conditions. For this reason, it is treated as an important hydrocarbon source rock. The simplified sketch in Fig. 1 shows the geological profile of the once existing open pit.
The original etiquette label found with “the vampire of Csillaghegy”, the fossil of this article, says that it was collected from the “Ziegelfabrik von Csillaghegy, NNW. – Budapest, Kisceller Ton”. However, since the host rocks of the fossil are laminated, it probably originated from the anoxic Tard Clay and, at that time, the two Oligocene formations were not separated, and only the name “Kiscell Clay” was in use. The find itself is not very spectacular: it is only 14cm long, dark-coloured, leaf-like fossil of a cephalopod (Fig. 2).
The site was also known as Péter-hegy (Péter Hill) in the earlier literature. The once important outcrop does not exist anymore. As a result of real estate development during the last decades, the clay-pit was filled and built over completely by modern apartment buildings.
What the hell is this vampire?
The fossil specimen collected at Csillaghegy was eventually donated by a school director, Gy. Kiss-Váradi, to Miklós Kretzoi (1907–2005), a versatile and distinguished palaeontologist (Fig. 3), who was, at the time, a research curator at the Palaeontological and Geological Department of the Hungarian National Museum. Despite working mainly with vertebrate fossils, Miklós Kretzoi immediately recognised the significance of the find and described it as a new species of a new genus, Necroteuthis hungarica, in the bulletin of the Hungarian Geological Society, the Földtani Közlöny (Kretzoi, Miklós, 1942).
In the article, which was published in German, Kretzoi placed Necroteuthis in the cephalopod group Coleoidea, and within this, into a new family (Necroteuthidae) he had established. The Coleoidea include all cephalopods still living today – octopuses, squid and cuttlefish – with the exception of the 90-armed Nautilus.
“Probably lost”
The article describing Necroteuthis was published in 1942, and the remains became part of the collection of the Hungarian National Museum and eventually of the Geological and Palaeontological Department of the Hungarian Natural History Museum. The collection was hit by gunfire in 1956, when Soviet tanks shelled the capital. As a consequence, many of the inventory books were burned and the material stored there was badly damaged.
When the objects that had been scavenged from the ruins were re-inventoried in 1959, the Necroteuthis specimens was wrongly inventoried as Sepia (Fig. 4).This may have been due to fact that there were numerous cuttlefish (Sepia) fossils from another nearby Oligocene site (the clay pit of the Kiscell Brickworks) in the collection, and these superficially resembled Necroteuthis. This is how, when the English-language, type-catalogue of the museum’s paleontological collection was published in 2008, Necroteuthis was listed as “probably lost” (Pálfy, J. et al, 2008).
However, the Necroteuthis is not cuttlebone, but a “gladius”. The word comes from Latin, and refers to the short, straight sword used by Roman legionaries and gladiators, since the latter’s shape is similar to that of the remains of the Necroteuthis.
The cuttlebone is unique to cuttlefish species, which belong the cephalopod family Sepiidae (Fig. 5). Other cephalopods have “gladius”. However, the similarity in shape between the cuttlebones and the gladius is deceptive: the gladius is not internally septated (that is, having divisions or partitioning of a cavity) and does not serve buoyancy control, like the cuttlebone. Its role is quite different: it did not control the animal’s hovering, but stiffened the soft body of the cephalopod and its mantle, and it also served as a muscle gripping surface.
The rediscovery
Mistakenly identified after 1956 as a cuttlebone, the type specimen of Necroteuthis was long thought to be lost. Recently, however, Czech and Slovak colleagues – Martin Košťák and Jan Schlögl– visiting the collection of the Museum’s palaeontological collection, were looking for Oligocene fossils in the vicinity of Budapest when they came across the find. The re-examination of the exceptional remains was carried out by an international team of 11 people. All possible modern methods and tools, including Micro-CT (Fig. 6), SEM photography and stable isotope analysis were used to ensure success.
The results confirmed Miklós Kretzoi’s recognition that the find is unique (Košťák, M., 2021). The researchers identified Necroteuthis as a rare representative of a group of cephalopods. They eventually concluded that the fossil was a Vampyroteuthidae, or vampire squid. The only living representative of this group is known today, the Vampyroteuthis infernalis, which inhabits the deep seas (Fig. 7). Its Latin name translates into English as “infernal vampire squid”.
A living fossil
There are two main things to say about the extant vampire squid: it is neither a vampire (of course not), nor a squid. Among the coleoids alive today, Vampyroteuthis is a living fossil, like the famous Coelacanth fish Latimeria, whose discovery was perhaps the greatest zoological discovery of the twentieth century.
The vampire squid is a very special animal (Fig. 8). Barely 30cm long, the red and black cephalopod has huge eyes, the largest in the animal kingdom compared to its body. Its eight arms, equipped with suction cups and hooks, are held together by a bell-shaped leather skirt on top.
The bell can bend backwards, so the animal can turn itself inside out, just as we turn the shirt off our backs. The ends of the arms light up when needed – a particularly useful skill at depths of many hundreds of meters, where the animal is surrounded by almost total darkness. The slow swimming, hovering vampire squid is not an active hunter like other Coleoidea. Two long “threads”, with a sticky surface hang from its body. It feeds on the tiny creatures that cling to them and on the tiny organic debris that falls from the surface of the oceans into the deep like snow.
Adaptation to the oxygen-depleted depths
Analysis of the rediscovered find has revealed that the Oligocene Necroteuthis is a link that connects the only living vampire squid today with its ancestors that lived, very close in morphology, 120 million years ago. However, while the ancestral forms of the Mesozoic era lived in the shallow seas at the continental margins (the so-called continental shelf), the present-day Vampyroteuthis infernalis lives at depths of 600 to 1,200m, in the so-called oxygen minimum zone, and can dive up to 3,000m, in the oxygen-depleted, deep-water body to which very few organisms have been able to adapt.
However, until now, very little has been known about when and why vampire squid retreated into their dark, deep, cold and oxygen-depleted world. The recently performed extensive paleontological and geochemical studies confirmed that the rock that enclosed Necroteuthis (Tard clay) was deposited in a deep sea, with an oxygen-depleted environment at the bottom. Vampire squid have therefore inhabited this particular oxygen-poor environment since at least the Oligocene (Fig. 9).
During the short periods of the so-called Ocean Anoxic Events of the Jurassic (a) and Cretaceous (b), occurrences of these cephalopods were associated with geographically extensive anoxic conditions on continental shelves.
The Oligocene habitat of Necroteuthis hungarica is indicated on drawing (c). Bathymetric conditions, based on geochemical data of the gladius record, correspond to bathyal habitats with water depth deeper than 400m. Shallower, shelf environments were characterised by seagrass meadows with seagrass-associated foraminiferal assemblages. Recent living conditions of Vampyroteuthis infernalis adapted to the Oxygen Minimum Zone at depths deeper than 600m.
TOC refers to the “total organic carbon” of the rock, which is related to the oxygen conditions of the former environment, where it was formed. The value of the carbon 13 stable isotope (δ13C) of the rock is also indicated, since it is again a useful proxy for ancient palaeoenvironment. (After Košťák et al. 2021.)
There is little food available for the animals that inhabit the depths, but the environment is fairly constant. Specialised for such distinct conditions but stable habitats, the organisms themselves then change slowly over millions of years. This is why the vampire squid of today is considered a living fossil, just as Necroteuthis was in the Oligocene, when it was already more than 100 million years away from its last known relatives from the Early Cretaceous.
| Rókahegy Geological Trail |
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| Budapest and its immediate surroundings also offer many geological attractions, but if you visit Csillaghegy, then you should visit the nearby Rókahegy Geological Trail. The 3.5km walk takes you through an abandoned quarry system. You can see the Triassic Dachstein limestone, the Eocene Nummulitic limestone and the Oligocene Tard clay, in which the vampire of the Csillaghegy was found. The result of the work of the thermal waters, there are several caves and also hot spring water-solved spherules, which emerge from the deep caverns. The area is also valuable from a botanical point of view, with rare flowers such as orchids blooming in spring. In autumn, the mine is regularly visited by migrating rare wallcreepers (Tichodro mamuraria) to the delight of birdwatchers. |
About the author
István Főzy is a palaeontologist, and was a researcher and senior curator in the Geological and Palaeontological Department at the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest, Hungary. He is now a Scientific Advisor at the HUN-REN-MTA–MTM–ELTE Research Group for Paleontology.
References
Báldi, T. (1986): Mid-Tertiary Stratigraphy and Paleogeographic Evolution of Hungary. Akadémia Publishing House, Budapest, 1–201.
Báldi, T. (2010): A Nagy-kevély és környéke – In: Palotai, M. (Ed.) Geológiai kirándulások Magyarország közepén, Hantken Kiadó, Budapest, 94–129. [A Nagy-kevély and its surroundings. In: Palotai, M. (Ed.) Geological excursion in Mid-Hungary. Hantken Publishing House, Budapest, 94–129.]
Košťák, M., Schlögl, J., Fuchs, Holcová, Ok.,Hudáčková, N., Culka, A., Főzy, I., Tomašových, A., Milovský, R., Šurka, J. & Mazuch, M. (2021): Fossil proof for vampire squid inhabiting oxygen-depleted ocean zones since not less than the Oligocene. Communications Biology, 4:216, https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-01714-0 | https://www.nature.com/commsbio/
Kretzoi, Miklós (1942): Necroteuthis n.gen. (Ceph. Dibr. Necroteuthidaen.f.) from the Oligocene of Budapest and the system of the Dibranchiata. –Földtani Közlöny, 72, 124–138.
Pálfy, J., Dulai, A., Gasparik, M., Ozsvárt, P., Pazonyi, P., Szives, O. (2008): Palaeontological Kind Specimens of the Hungarian Pure Historical past Museum. Hungarian Pure Historical past Museum, Budapest, 1–209.
Solt, P. (1986): Odontaspis (Synodontaspis) divergens n. sp. a csillaghegyi oligocénből – A Magyar Állami Földtani Intézet Évi Jelentése az 1986. évről: 524–533. [Odontaspis (Synodontaspis) divergens n. sp. from the Oligocene of Csillaghegy. – Annual Report of the Hungarian Geological Institute from the year 1986:524–533.]
Tari G., Báldi T., Báldi-Beke M. (1993): Paleogene retroarch flexural basin beneath the neogene Pannonian Basin: a geodynamic mannequin. – Tectonophysics, 226, 433–455.
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