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 Gulch limstone formation in Montana, USA, an area which was once a marine bay and is renowned for its exceptional preservation of fossils from the Carboniferous period, this bizarre find has reshaped our understanding of cephalopod evolution.
After the discovery, the fossil was donated to the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada in 1988, where it remained overlooked for decades until Christopher Whalen, a paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York recognized its significance. The remarkably well-preserved specimen has served to offer tantalizing clues about their ancient behavior and ecology.
The fossilized remains of Syllipsimopodi bideni, the ten-legged ancestor of the modern octopus. (Whalen et. al. / CC BY 4.0 DEED)
