Liberal Debutante

(I’m going to stop with the quirky titles and just go with the animal name from now on… put the intro line after)

Largest carnivore in the Ordovician (like that)

pronounced: cam-er-a-sair-us meaning “chambered horn”
animal type: cephalopod mollusc
time: 470 - 440 mya
size: Huge. 10 - 11 meters long with a 9 -10 meter shell
found: North America
diet: Carnivore
fossil:

Huge. The biggest animal around during the Ordovician, in fact. It is classified as an orthocone, a squidish creature living inside of a long, straight shell that was once mistaken for unicorn horns. It also had 8 tentacles that were almost a meter long and had a grooved surface as opposed to the suckers that are found on a moder squid).  Like their relatives the ammonites and the nautilus the ordovician shell was divided into various compartments that could fill with water or air depending on the direction the animal wanted to float in the water. Moving up and down in the water was easy in comparison to the effort the animal would have to exude to swim due to its large shell.

The othocone had a flexible hyponome, a large tube of flesh, hanging just underneath its head that could point in any direction. It would push water through this tube at a high pressure propelling its self in the opposite direction.

It is assumed that like most molluscs the othocones likely spent their days hiding in the dark resting and at night would move into more shallow water to hunt it’s prey the trilobites and megalograptus. Their eyesight was pretty shoddy, but they made up for it with their chemical sensors picking up the scent of their prey. It would use their tentacles to grab onto the prey and rip it apart with it’s bird like beak.

Some of the fossils of the orthocones that have been found have preserved colors and have been found in thousands of places. Unlike the cameroceras most of the orthocones grew to be only a few centimetres long. The orthocones in general evolved at around 495 mya and became extinct 255 mya.