Meet the ten-armed, 325-million-year-old octopus fossil named after President Joe Biden

By Tom Fletcher, Honorary Research Fellow in Palaeobiology, University of Leicester

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), has ten arms, suckers, fins, and a triangular pen of hard tissue inside its body for support. It’s a unique find because “squishy” animals tend to degrade…

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