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

March 8, 2022

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 quickly after death and therefore rarely make good fossils.

We don’t know when this unusual fossil was discovered, but in 1988 it was donated to the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada. It would sit largely ignored for more than 30 years until American palaeontologists Christopher Whalen and Neil Landman decided to study it.

The researchers have named the species Syllipsimopodi bideni after Joe Biden, the 46th president of the United States. Biden had just been inaugurated when the study was submitted for publication, and the authors wanted to recognise his commitment to science.

https://theconversation.com/meet-the-ten-armed-325-million-year-old-octopus-fossil-named-after-president-joe-biden-178566

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28333-5