As boneless, gelatinous bags, octopuses rarely find themselves preserved as fossils but just this week it was announced in the journal Palaeontology that three new 95,000,000 year old octopus fossils have been discovered. These are the oldest on record. So what does an octopus fossil look like? Apparently, like something your elementary school child would create in art class when asked to create an octopus fossil.
The precursors to modern octopuses had fins that ran alongside their bodies but these fossils do not. “These are sensational fossils, extraordinarily well preserved’ says Dirk Fuchs of the Freie University Berlin, lead author of the report. But what surprised the scientists most was how similar the specimens are to modern octopus: “these things are 95 million years old, yet one of the fossils is almost indistinguishable from living species.” All of this raises an obvious question: if octopuses were so sophisticated 95 million years ago, why aren’t they running things right now?! Clearly god did not favor the octopus.
As this is “cephalopod” and “science” related, it stands to reason that PZ Meyers beat us to it, which he did. Get your fix for buccal masses and gladial vestiges over there.