In an ancient shallow bay of what is now Montana. the body of an octopus-like creature the size of a fist was buried on the seafloor. Some 325-328 million years later, a new paper published in Nature Communications provides some interesting insights into this mysterious and ancient cephalopod.
Syllipsimopodi bideni is small (about 12cm in length), and a triangular pen of hard tissue inside its body for support. It’s a unique find because “squishy” animals tend to degrade quickly after death and therefore rarely make good fossils. We don’t know when this unusual fossil was discovered, but in 1988 it was donated to the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada. It would sit largely ignored for more than 30 years until American palaeontologists Christopher Whalen and Neil Landman decided to study it.
The researchers have named the species Syllipsimopodi bideni after Joe Biden, the 46th President of the U.S. Biden had just been inaugurated when the study was submitted for publication, and the authors wanted to recognise his commitment to science
The authors suggest that Syllipsimopodi bidents features make it the oldest member of a group called the vampyropods. This is the group of cephalopods that includes modem octopuses and the “vampire squid”. While octopuses will be familiar to you, the vampire squid may not. There is a single surviving species, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, whose name means “vampire squid from hell”, despite being more closely related to octopuses.
Notably, the vampire “squid” has primitive features in common with this new species Syllipsimopodi bideni, such as 10 limbs and a stiff internal shell. No living octopus has either of these. Until now, it was thought that the vampyropods (octopus relatives) originated in the Triassic period around 240 million years ago. But this new species pushes that back a further 82 million years, which is more time than separates humans from Tyrannosaurus rex. PTI .
Picture Credit : Google
