The Ancestor of the Octopus (maybe)
The discovery of an ancient cephalopod fossil could be about to rewrite octopus history.
Finding properly fossilised octopus fossils is difficult, due to the animal’s climate and soft, fleshy body. Enter Syllipsimopodi bideni, a ten armed, 330 million year old octopus fossil that was donated to the Ontario Museum in 1988. And with scientists recently taking a closer look, some have suggested that it is a vampyropod, a type of cephalopod, and one of the few of its kind, as they told Nature Communications on March 8. If these scientists are correct, that would make this vampyropod the oldest octopus ancestor by about 80 million years. “This is overturning about 100 years of science in cephalopod evolution,” says invertebrate palaeontologist Christopher Whalen, to Nature Communications.
However, the true identity of the creature hinges on whether or not it has a gladius, named after the Roman Sword of the same name. The gladius is a hard internal body part identified by its slender growth lines along the fossil’s edge. But not every scientist believes there to be a gladius at all.
“That’s not the gladius, I’m sorry,” says Christian Klug, a cephalopod palaeontologist at the University of Zurich, to Nature Communications. Some, like Mr Klug, are arguing that the ‘gladius’ is really just a series of chambers found in shells of earlier cephalopods. This sort of debate is apparently the norm in palaeontology circles. The specific identifications of body parts, organs and bones can alter drastically even depending from the angle you look at the specimen from. But that doesn’t mean that the identification process is all over the place. Palaeontologists need a firm grasp on subjects like zoology, botany, anatomy, and even geology to do what they do, as well a deep understanding of the fossilisation process. Yet even in perfectly preserved fossils and specimens, observed by top notch palaeontologists, there may be differences in how they are interpreted. Some scientists may choose more technical methods, some may choose to focus on more specific parts of the fossilised creature. The validity of the determination ultimately relies on how reasonable it is, given the science.
But in the case of S.bideni here, the discovery of more specimens, advanced technology, and more research being put into their findings and identification could lead to scientists getting the right answer.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/fossil-octopus-cephalopod-ancestor-10-arms-debate-identity
