The discovery of a new vampyropod named after President Biden could give us a look at the octopus' oldest known ancestor.
The original discovery team donated the fossil to the Royal Ontario Museum in 1988. It sat in a drawer until a paleontologist named Christopher Whalen noticed preserved arms inside of the fossil. Whalen then looked at the fossil under a microscope and discovered tiny suckers all along the arms.
As Dr. Whalen looked deeper into the fossil, he says he expected to find similarities between it and other cephalopods found in Montana’s limestone. However, he found something quite different. After inspecting the creature, Dr. Whalen and his colleagues believe it is the oldest known ancestor of modern-day vampyropods. This group includes octopuses and vampire squids.
The discovery pushes back the earliest evidence of this group by almost 82 million years. The creature has 10 arms, all of which have suckers on them. Dr. Whalen and the other authors on the study say that the new creature is evidence that all cephalopods once had 10 arms. However, as time passed, some members of the vampyropod family’s arms were reduced to nothing more than filaments, or they were lost altogether.
The newest vampyropod was identified close to the inauguration of the United States’ 46th President, Joseph Biden. In celebration of the election, and Biden’s support for science, the team named the vampyropod after him, calling it the
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