The Squid With The Human-Like Teeth! (Promachoteuthis sulcus!)

Welcome to another post of my strange animals series where you get to meet some of the weirdest, coolest, and craziest animals in the world.

So today's strange animal is not exactly that strange! What do I mean by that? Well.. let's first start with a photo:

Promachoteuthis sulcus (credit)

The creature depicted above is scientifically described as Promachoteuthis sulcus and as you can see it's a squid with human-like teeth! So maybe now you are thinking that a squid with human-like teeth definitely falls under the "strange animal" category, right? 

Well, the thing is that it doesn't! And that's because the structures that look like teeth are just circular folded lips! Just another case of bad (or maybe good?) photography!  

So, other than the fake "teeth" of P. Sulcus there's not much else really interesting to say about it! The main reason for that is because we actually know very little about it! The species is only known by a single specimen caught in 2007 by the German research vessel Walther Herwig, near the Tristan Da Cunha islands, at a depth of 1,750 to 2,000 m.

The specimen was an immature female, about 2,5 cm  (1 inch) long. 

The species name sulcus "refers to the characteristic, unique, aboral, furrow-like groove along the proximal one-third of the tentacular stalk". [source] 

It is distinguished from related taxa on the basis of several morphological features: nuchal fusion between the head and mantle, much larger size of arm suckers compared to club suckers, greater width of tentacle base than arm base, a recessed club base, and the presence of an aboral tentacle groove. [source]

Feel free to visit the paper that describes the species if you want to read all the "boring" details about its anatomy.

As mentioned before, we have only caught only one non-sexually matured specimen and the species has never been recorded live in the wild so we really don't know much about it! So, with not much else interesting to share about the animal I will close this post with another photo:

 
P. Sulcus Ventrolateral View (credit)

More Strange Animals

If you enjoyed reading about this strange creature make sure to check some of my latest posts. I am sure you will love them:

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