Introduction
The sacabamapis is probably one of my favorite ordivician fish. Even though it's extinct now, it's still a really interesting little critter. I'm a massive nerd when it comes to extinct animals, and this takes the cake as one of my favorites. It's just a little guy, but this one fish is also extremely important when it came to fish evolution.
I love this little creature with all my heart, and even those they're long extinct due to the LOME (Late Ordivician Mass Extinction), they've found popularity due to their charm as a little model in the Natural History Museum of Helsinki, a museum in Finland where the famous model resides.
I'm a huge lover of prehistoric animals, especially from around this time, and sacabamapis is one of my favorites. It just has a vibe of not knowing about it's own existence to it, and I find that to be amusing (even if the possibly more accurate models make it look mildly more horrific, I can still get behind it).
Habitat
This species lived in the shallow waters between the continenal margins of southern Gondwana and in the shallow southern oceans, and now it's most complete fossils have been located in Bolivia, with armor fragments being found as far as Argentina, Oman, and even Australia. That's quite a bit of range, but it makes sense due to the fact od tectonic plates moving, along with the fact that it went extinct hundreds of millions of years ago.
Actually, to elaborate of the compete specimains in Bolivia, they were all found in a confined space, suspected to be the result of a fish kill, probably because of a influx of fresh water (they were not made to survive in fresh water). These are most of the complete specimans we have currently, which is kind of sad, because this is most we know about their full anatomy beyond armor fragments. Who knows, they could be much larger in reality compared to what we have currently, though that may not be likely.
Biology
The sacabamapis is actually a genus of extinct jawless fish, but it so far only has one member to it's name: Sacabamapis janvieri. It reached only 10 inches in length, and looked like a mildly fucked up tadpole. It also didn't have a jaw, it's literally one of the most famous jawless fish. Instead of chewing, the inside of it's mouth had about 60 rows of really tiny, bony (and probably moveable) oral plates, kind of like teeth.
It had armor on every inch of it's body, the largest ones being the dorsal plate and the ventral plate. It's headshield had oak-leaf shaped turbricals, with the side of the head having diamond-shaped brachial plates that seperated the two plates, and likely acting as gills.
The only fin of the sacabambaspis was its caudal fin, aka the back fin. It probably swam similarly to a tadpole due to this fact (they already look the part), ungracefully and undignified, swinging the bastard around like a sock filled with pennies. Now though, with more recent research, there's the possibility that it's tail was longer and more eel or shark-like, almost like a whip. So it wasn't swinging the thing around like a sock full of pennies, but actually whipping the water around it like Indiana Jones.
Now, the sacabambaspis' legacy in evolution is a lateral line, as it is the first fish to show signs of having one. Now, I'm probably going to have to take a detour to explain what the hell a lateral line is, so here we go...
A lateral line is a sensory organ found in fish that allows for the detection of movement, vibrations, and the pressure gradient in water. It's essential for fish schooling, as it is what allows for fish to not crash into eachother and fuck up the school. Even blind fish that school are able to do it with the power of the lateral line, when fish with severed lateral lines cannot. Predetory fish that are blinded are also able to hunt because of the lateral line, because of their ability to still sense movements.
Now that you know about the function of the lateral line, you'll understand why it's important for fish today who have. It's a system that allows for fish to navigate the water easier, because even if they are blinded, they are still able to feel things.
Diet
Now, we don't really have much information on the diet of the Sacabambaspis (or I'm an idiot who missed major sources when researching this part), but the best info on the diet of the Sacabambaspis was that it ate algae, plankton, and bits of meat off of the carcasses of predetors. It didn't really have many choices on what it could eat, due to the fact that it had a major case of not-having-a-jaw syndrome, but it persisted!
then boom. LOME.
But I digress. From what I could find, it probably fed by suction feeding--basically, filter-feeding's cooler cousin. To do this, it rapidly expanded and contracted it's oral cavity (because it was jawless, it could't close it's mouth), using those bony oral cavities to provide more efficiecy to the process.
Why Even Present It Like This?
why not. I like Sacabambaspis, no matter what it looks like (even the horrific, possibly lifelike one). I just did this as a fun little project dedicated to the fish, and I'm probably gonna do more of these for different fish. I enjoy doing research, even when I come up empty handed on some parts (like the diet). This is a shrine to Sacabambaspis, and by extention, the research I did to make this shrine as accurate as possible. I'm a huge paleolithic animals nerd, and it just so happens that this is a fish I like. Why not dedicate a part of my website to this little critter, and also inform people about much more than it's looks.
plus this is basically a formally researched version of me infodumping about topics I like. Paleolithic critters are my special interest (as a likely autistic person), and it's fun to research the silly internet fish.