March
14
/ 2024
Locked away in a drawer in a museum in Canada, scientists rediscovered a fossil that rewrote the paleontological history of the octopus, revealing its earliest known ancestor. To their surprise, not only did this sea creature exist about 330 million years ago—before the era of the dinosaurs—but it also had ten legs! Rewriting the Evolution of the Octopus In a groundbreaking study published in the journal Nature Communications in 2022, researchers detailed the discovery of the new species of vampyropod which pushed back the age of the oldest known ancestor of octopuses by 82 million years. This means that they existed before the dinosaurs who roamed the earth from about 252 to 66 million years ago. Discovered in the Bear
