14 The Week Junior • 19 March 2022

A

discovery in an old museum store has pushed

back the date of the first octopuses by more than

80 million years, proving for the first time that they

were swimming in Earth’s oceans 328 million years

ago – long before the dinosaurs ruled on land. The

find also suggests that the earliest octopuses had

10 arms rather than eight.

Octopuses and squid are part of a group of

soft-bodied animals called cephalopods (meaning

“head-feet”) – the same group as the extinct spiral-

shelled ammonites. Octopuses have eight arms

lined with suckers for grasping prey

but squid have 10 arms, two of

which are officially tentacles

(smooth limbs that haven’t

got suckers all the way

along). Until now, the

origins of the two groups

have been a mystery but

some scientists think

that a unique animal

called a vampire squid

holds the answer. This

has eight arms but also a

pair of thin attachments called

filaments. Despite its name, it

is a closer relative of octopuses than

squid, leading experts to suspect that octopuses and

vampire squid both evolved from an animal with 10

suckered arms.

The new find, named Syllipsimopodi bideni after

US president Joe Biden, seems to confirm this theory.

It too is a vampire squid but its longest pair of arms

are stronger than the puny filaments on the modern-

day version – and all 10 arms have suckers. The new

species was found as a fossil (a trace of an ancient

creature left in mud that has turned to stone) buried

in what was once the sea bed at a site called Bear

Gulch in the US state of Montana.

It lay unstudied at Canada’s

Royal Ontario Museum

from 1988 until it was

spotted by scientist

Christopher Whalen of

the American Museum

of Natural History in

New York. Nearly 330

million years ago, Bear

Gulch was a shallow bay

where dying animals were

rapidly buried in mud and

preserved. Until now the oldest

confirmed octopus fossils dated to

about 240 million years ago.

Oldest octopus found

Fossil researchers have found the youngest

known survivor of a famous group of prehistoric

ocean predators called the eurypterids, or sea

scorpions. Scientists from Australia and Germany

analysed a fragment of a metre-long eurypterid

found in Queensland, Australia, in the 1990s,

and found that it died around 252 million years

ago. This makes it 11 million years more recent

than the previous youngest known specimen.

It suggests that the sea scorpions, which evolved

around 488 million years ago, finally went extinct

during a “mass extinction” event that wiped out

96% of all marine life.

The last sea scorpion

An artist’s view of

an extinct ammonite.

Eurypterids hunted

on the sea floor.

Science and technology

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Syllipsimopodi was about.

12 centimetres long.