Biden has ancient sea creature named for him
NEW HAVEN — A close look at a 328 million-year-old ancestor of today’s octopuses revealed 10 arms, confirming theories of how the creatures evolved.
And in a nod to President Joe Biden’s commitment to science and the beginning of his administration, researchers at Yale University and the American Museum of Natural History have named it after him. Their paper was published in the journal Nature Communications.
Christopher Whalen, a postdoctoral fellow in Yale’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and at the natural history museum in New York, went to the Royal Ontario Museum in search of a different kind of cephalopod, the class that includes octopuses and squids. Not finding what he was looking for, Whalen took out some other fossils on loan, including one found in Montana’s Bear Gulch.
When he looked at the fossil, Whalen was surprised by what had been preserved. “I noticed on this fossil in particular that the arms were preserved, which is very rare,” he said. Squids and octopuses are coleoids, which have soft bodies that don’t preserve well.
“Normally, it’s very rare already to get a
coleoid, a soft-bodied cephalopod, but if you’re getting it, you’re getting the harder parts of the shell. … It’s not unheard of, but it’s pretty rare to get the arms,” he said.
“And then, when I looked at the arms under a microscope, I noticed that there were actually suction cups or suckers on the arms, two rows on each arm. And that’s incredibly rare,” he said. “There’s only a handful of fossils that have ever been discovered that preserve the actual suckers on cephalopod arms.”
The fossil, which he and his co-author, Neil Landman, of the Museum of Natural History, named Syllipsimopodi bideni, also was an example of a 10-armed cephalopod. It’s related to modern octopuses and vampire squids, which Whalen said actually are a form of octopus, not a squid.
Octopuses have eight arms; vampire squids have eight, too, connected by a web of skin which give them a cape-like appearance. They also have two filaments, which are thought to be vestiges of the 10 arms that the newly named fossil has.
The 10-armed fossil is 82 million years older than any known vampyropod, the group that includes octopuses and vampire squids. “It’s really that combination of being the oldest and sort of the earliest in an evolutionary tree that made it so significant,” Whalen said.
Being both oldest and earliest are significant, he said. A later generation can leave remains that are older than those left by an earlier generation because they lived at the same time.
The limestone fossil came from the Bear Gulch part of Montana. “And this is from a time when this part of Montana would have been submerged under a tropical marine bay, tropical because that part of North America would have been situated near the equator at the time,” Whalen said. It would have been most like the Bay of Bengal off India today, he said.
Whalen said the paper was submitted shortly after Biden’s inauguration. “And we liked the plans he put forward to address climate change and fund science, so it seemed like a nice way to sort of bring attention to those policies,” he said.
Since the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol had occurred two weeks before Biden was inaugurated, “It felt like it would be a good time to say something, even in a small way, that was positive about the start of Biden’s presidency rather than negative,” Whalen said. “So it seemed like a nice forwardlooking thing to do. … It was intended as a compliment.”
Whalen said he hasn’t heard from the White House about the honor. A request from Hearst Connecticut Media for comment did not yield an immediate response.