300-million-year-old sea creature mistaken for the world’s oldest octopus
For years, this fossil seemed to tell a thrilling story. Here was an animal from more than 300 million years ago that appeared to look like an octopus, complete with what were described as arms, fins and no visible shell. It was so important that it helped push the origin of octopuses far deeper into Earth’s past than many scientists had expected. Now that story has collapsed. A new reexamination of Pohlsepia mazonensis, a famous fossil from Illinois, has found that the supposed “oldest octopus” was not an octopus at all. Instead, researchers say it belonged to a nautiloid, a group related to today’s Nautilus, the shelled marine animal often called a living fossil. The real clue came from tiny teeth hidden inside the rock for hundreds of millions of years. “It turns out the world’s most famous octopus fossil was never an octopus at all,” said Dr. Thomas Clements, lead author of the study and a lecturer in invertebrate zoology at the University of Reading. “It was a nautilus relative that had been decomposing …
