The oldest fossil octopus isn’t an octopus at all.
That’s the conclusion from new research on a perplexing fossil previously thought to be the most ancient record of an octopus. The findings — published April 8 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B — suggest the roughly 310-million-year-old fossilized sea creature was actually a partly decomposed nautilus. Such a reclassification has implications for scientists’ understanding of the evolution of octopuses, nautiluses and cephalopods as a whole.
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