{"id":43747,"date":"2026-10-26T17:55:41","date_gmt":"2026-10-26T21:55:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/?p=43747"},"modified":"2026-10-26T17:55:41","modified_gmt":"2026-10-26T21:55:41","slug":"wyoming-barrel-shaped-belemnite-squid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wyoming-barrel-shaped-belemnite-squid\/43747\/","title":{"rendered":"Sitting forgotten in a museum drawer for decades, a “barrel-shaped oddity” from Wyoming just upended 200 years of squid science"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wyoming paleontologist Bill Wahl had spent years pulling belemnite fossils from the ancient seafloor sediments of the Sundance Formation \u2014 narrow, bullet-shaped things, millions of them, so familiar they barely warranted a second glance. Then he opened a museum drawer and found something that stopped him cold: a belemnite rostrum roughly the shape and width of a small fist, barrel-like where everything else was sleek<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

It had been sitting there, largely unexamined, for years. That stubby, oversized fossil from Wyoming’s long-vanished inland sea would eventually force scientists to rethink more than two centuries of assumptions about an extinct group of squid relatives.<\/p>\n

A fossil that stuck out like a sore thumb<\/h2>\n

The Sundance Formation is belemnite country. Millions of narrow, bullet-shaped rostra have emerged from its ancient seafloor sediments \u2014 so common that locals call them “squid butts.”<\/strong> Most measure 5 to 10 centimeters long and just 1 to 2 centimeters across: slender, predictable, unremarkable.<\/p>\n

The specimen Dr. Burkhard Pohl found in the late 1990s was none of those things. The Wyoming Dinosaur Center’s founder had come across a belemnite considerably larger than anything he’d seen before \u2014 its rostrum stretched roughly 10 centimeters long but ballooned to an extraordinary 6 centimeters wide, barrel-shaped where everything else tapered to a point.<\/p>\n

Despite its obvious strangeness, the fossil sat unstudied in a museum drawer for years<\/strong>. A second specimen arrived in 2019, donated by fossil collector Cliff Linster, who had found it near Ten Sleep, Wyoming. Two specimens gave scientists something a single oddity couldn’t: enough comparative material to act on.<\/p>\n

CT scans unlock a 160-million-year-old secret<\/h2>\n

Bill Wahl assembled an international team from the US, UK, and New Zealand to investigate the pair of fossils. Rather than risk damaging them, researchers turned to CT scanning \u2014 a technique that maps internal structures without touching the specimen.<\/p>\n

The scans revealed something unexpected. The fossils’ internal architecture connected them to a belemnite family scientists had believed vanished millions of years before this animal ever existed.<\/strong> A supposed ghost lineage, preserved in Jurassic Wyoming rock \u2014 not what anyone was looking for.<\/p>\n

Belemnite expert Alexey Ippolitov, now a PhD student at Victoria University of Wellington, described being “deeply surprised.” Belemnites have been studied for more than 200 years. The formal description of the new species, Wyoteuthis linsterorum<\/em>, appears in the journal Papers in Palaeontology<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Opalized Peratobelus guard from the Early Cretaceous<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

Big body, bigger appetite \u2014 how Wyoteuthis may have hunted<\/h2>\n

Size matters in the ocean, and Wyoteuthis<\/em> had plenty of it. Scientists estimate the living animal reached roughly 60 centimeters \u2014 about two feet \u2014 in total length, arms included<\/strong>. That’s substantial for an ancient inland sea already populated by far smaller belemnites.<\/p>\n

Those smaller neighbors, belonging to the genus Pachyteuthis<\/em>, may have been more than just cohabitants. Ippolitov suggests Wyoteuthis<\/em>‘s larger size could have given it a predatory edge, and modern squid readily hunt other cephalopod species<\/a> \u2014 sometimes their own kind \u2014 making similar behavior plausible here. Its rarity in the fossil record may reflect narrow ecological specialization rather than low numbers: a creature finely tuned to a specific niche<\/a>, leaving fewer traces behind.<\/p>\n

Honoring the fossil hunter who made it possible<\/h2>\n

The species name linsterorum<\/em> is a deliberate tribute. Cliff Linster’s donated specimen provided the second data point that made formal description possible; without it, the first fossil might have remained an unexplained curiosity indefinitely<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

For Dr. Dean Lomax of the University of Manchester, the naming carries personal weight. He first met Cliff and Sandy Linster in 2009, spending a week as a teenager excavating a dinosaur bonebed on their Montana property. Cliff shared his passion for fossils during that dig<\/strong> \u2014 including, apparently, this belemnite. The Linster family’s record also includes ties to Bambiraptor<\/em>, a well-known dinosaur find \u2014 a remarkable legacy for amateur collectors.<\/p>\n

Cliff Linster passed away in June 2026, before the paper was published. He knew scientists were investigating his discovery and was enthusiastic about seeing it recognized.<\/p>\n

What one oddly shaped fossil tells us about paleontology<\/h2>\n

The story of Wyoteuthis linsterorum<\/em> is, in part, a story about patience. A fossil found in the 1990s<\/a>, donated in 2019, formally described in 2026<\/strong> \u2014 nearly three decades from discovery to publication. That timeline isn’t unusual. Museum collections aren’t endpoints; they’re waiting rooms.<\/p>\n

Amateur collectors aren’t peripheral to science, either. Cliff Linster’s donation was the piece that unlocked the puzzle. Without fossil hunters willing to donate rather than keep, formal research often stalls.<\/p>\n

Both known specimens of Wyoteuthis linsterorum<\/em> are now on public display at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis. A creature that lived 160 million years ago, belonging to a family thought long extinct, was hiding in a museum drawer<\/strong> \u2014 and it took a second fossil, found by a rancher with a sharp eye, to bring it into the light. How many drawers, in how many museums, still hold something equally strange?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wyoming paleontologist Bill Wahl had spent years pulling belemnite fossils from the ancient seafloor sediments of the Sundance Formation \u2014 narrow, bullet-shaped things, millions of them, so familiar they barely warranted a second glance. Then he opened a museum drawer and found something that stopped him cold: a belemnite rostrum roughly the shape and width … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":43820,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"squid,belemnite fossil","rank_math_title":"","rank_math_description":"Discover the groundbreaking find of *Wyoteuthis linsterorum*, a barrel-shaped belemnite fossil from Wyoming that challenges 200 years of squid science.","footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-earth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43747"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43827,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43747\/revisions\/43827"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}