Vampiroteuthis Tattoo

Any fule kno that the Early Victorians were weird. Part of that weirdness was their wont for reconstituting ink from long-fossilised cuttlefish, in order to draw or print fossils. Partly it was a medium-is-the-message thing, and partly it was a form of homage for the cephalopods, who were admired for their ability to disguise their real positions behind a cloud of ink. My extinct-species fossil-ink tattoo, let me show you it.I blame fish Reverend Doctor William Buckland.
There was also a market for the fossilised endoskeletal cuttlefish 'pens', which were given to fossilised cage-birds on which to sharpen their beaks.

This would all come as a surprise to writers for the National Geographic.

The story has now resurfaced (more information here):

"We felt that drawing the animal with it would be the ultimate self-portrait," said Dr Wilby.*

1968 version

Given that fossils with usable inksacs are precious rarities, the price of fossil sepia will surely escalate until Russian oligarchs and American kleptocrats would not hear of signing cheques with anything else. Will it work in a Staedler 0.35-mm technical pen? MYTHBUSTERS EPISODE.

The Creationists are on the case as well. The argument seems to be that if cephalopods were using sepia to evade their enemies 170 million years ago then Evolution is a lie because they have should have switched to a different technique by now (e.g. speaking in an assumed Ukrainian accent or wearing a Groucho Marx moustache). If Evolution gave us the Mimic Octopus then why are there still cuttlefish??! Not to mention the Young-Earth creationists who believe that Jurassic cuttlefish co-existed with Adam's descendents who used them to print copies of the Old Testament with the Doré engravings all muddy brown like YHWH intended... the survival of usable pigment proves that these molluscs were not petrified by a combination of sedimentary accumulation and eons of geology, but rather by a rogue medusa or such as in the recent past.

Now sepia is melanin, about which assiduous readers of Riddled know all -- the light-absorbing biopolymer used by humans and avians to photosynthesise with visible light, and by fungi for the same purpose with ionising radiation.** As noted elsewhere, it's supposed to be stable.

Neither history nor paleontology record whether Jurassic-era cuttlefish (or belemnite sister groups) ever incurred ridicule and hostility from their neighbours because they had the pheomelanin mutation that turned their ink to ginger rather than black.

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* Try drawing someone's portrait in their own blood and people are nowhere near so approving. DOUBLE STANDARD.

** Yet does "melanin" appear in the Riddled search statistics? Does it bogroll. Current popular terms are "chainsaw katana", "the pit and the pendulum", "gyropalette" and "snow nude naked".

UPDATED with Bonus Memo to self: next time I choose an extinct animal for a fossil-ink tattoo, opt for something smaller than Anomalocaris canadensis.