Cuttlefish

Shape and color changing are key survival traits for many animals. Chameleons can change their body to hide from predators, to reflect their moods, or even to defend their territory, while some soft-bodied animal-like octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish can change both their color and shape to signal or camouflage.

A pair of paleontologists at Universität Hohenheim's Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart has found a fossilized Jurassic-era fish that appears to have died after swallowing an overly large ammonite. Samuel Cooper and Erin Maxwell report their study of the fossil in the journal Geological Magazine.

Cuttlefish, along with other cephalopods like octopus and squid, are masters of disguise, changing their skin color and texture to blend in with their underwater surroundings.

Anything with three hearts, blue blood and skin that can change colors like a display in Times Square is likely to turn heads. Meet Sepia bandensis, known more descriptively as the camouflaging dwarf cuttlefish.

A team at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) has successfully engineered an albino strain of the hummingbird bobtail squid, Euprymna berryi. This advance, reported in Current Biology, has created a nearly transparent organism that offers scientists, for the first time, clear optical access for visualizing the nervous system in a living cephalopod.