A finding in an extremely rare case of being able to study organic material that is hundreds of millions of years old this suggests that the ink screen escape mechanism of cephalopods. Cuttlefish, squid and octopus has not evovled since the Jurassic period, and the melanin could be preserved intact in the fossils of a range of organisms.
The investigators compared the chemical composition of the fossil melanin to the melanin in the ink of the modern cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis, common to the Mediterranean North and Baltic seas