Cameroceras life

Cameroceras ("chambered horn") is a genus of orthoconic nautiloid from the Ordovician Period. Abundant in seas worldwide until the Early Silurian, it was a large apex predator and an early member of the cephalopod class that preyed upon most of the animals in its habitat. Although successful for millions of years and growing to immense sizes, the large nautiloids were hit particularly hard by the Late Ordovician mass extinction and never recovered. Cameroceras had a long, straight shell consisting of several chambers, the largest of which held the animal itself. These chambers were filled with gas, and by adjusting the levels, they could change their buoyancy by either floating upwards or sinking deeper.[1] Like other cephalopods, its primary weapons were its prehensile tentacles, used to grasp and manipulate creatures like trilobites while using a hard parrot-like beak and radula (an anatomical structure in molluscs similar to a tongue) to crush shells and rasp out soft tissue from within them. In the past, it was thought that orthocones swam horizontally like squid and cuttlefish.[2] Now, studies and 3D-printed replicas have shown that they maintained a vertical shell orientation while suspended in the water column.[3] The largest fossil Cameroceras shell has been measured at 2 meters (6.6 feet) in length.[4]