Sketch illustrating an hypothetical scene from the Sinemurian Fossil-Lagerstätte of Osteno (Italy). Tylacocephalan arthropod Ostenocaris cypriformis, cephalopod Ostenoteuthis and other taxa from the fossiliferous deposit are shown: Paleospinax pinnai is the shark; the crustaceans are Coleia sp. and undetermined shrimps. The sediment of Osteno is a spiculite-rich micrite (mostly calcitized spicules of siliceous sponges), which verosimilarly covered sea bottom. The thylacocephalans are the target of this reconstruction: they are represented as nectonic-demersal predators or opportunistic scavengers, hunting cephalopods and crustaceans or feeding carcasses, also of other thylacocephalans. The colors are clearly tentative: those of the sponges are taken from real present examples; those of the crustaceans are camouflage on the sponges. That of cephalopods is camouflage with the deep water background (as well as for sharks). The color of thylacocephalans (which are extinct) is fantasy (it is made green-brownish, similar to the old model reconstruction of Ostenocaris cypriformis at Museo civico di storia naturale di Milano). The soft parts of thylacocephalans are still poorly known and understood, and are matter of discussion among paleontologists, so are not rendered in detail.

References:

• Sylvain Charbonnier, Jean Vannier, Pierre Hantzpergue e Christian Gaillard, Ecological significance of the arthropod fauna from the Jurassic (Callovian) La Voulte Lagerstätte, in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, vol. 55, n. 1, 2010, pp. 111-132.
• Giovanni Pinna, Paolo Arduini, Carlo Pesarini e Giorgio Teruzzi, Thylacocephala: una nuova classe di crostacei fossili, in Atti Soc. ital. Sci. nat. Museo civ. Stor. nat. Milano, vol. 123, n. 4, Milano, 1982, pp. 469-482.
• Giovanni Pinna, Exceptional Preservation in the Jurassic of Osteno, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, vol. 311, n. 1148, London (UK), 1985, pp. 171-180.
• Giovanni Pinna, Paolo Arduini, Carlo Pesarini e Giorgio Teruzzi, Some controversial aspects of the morphology and anatomy of Ostenocaris cypriformis (Crustacea, Thylacocephala), in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. 76, Edimburgh, 1985, pp. 373–379.