Never let anyone tell you it’s too late in life to make a change. Take this 300 million-year-old octopus fossil, which, as it turns out, isn’t of an octopus after all.
According to The Associated Press, new research into the fossil, which has been named by Guinness World Records as the earliest known octopus, determined that it is instead a relative to the nautilus, which has tentacles and a shell.
“It’s a very difficult fossil to interpret,” says researcher Thomas Clements. “To look at it, it kind of just looks like a white mush. If you look at it and you are a cephalopod researcher and you’re interested in everything octopus, it does superficially look a lot like a deep-water octopus.”
However, there’s been a debate about the fossil since it was identified back in 2000, especially since the second-oldest known octopus fossil is a relatively youthful 90 million years old.
“It’s a huge gap,” Clements says. “And so that big gap got researchers sort of questioning, ‘Is this thing actually an octopus?'”
To answer that question, Clements’ team used technology that allowed them to look inside the fossil rock, and they determined it had too many teeth to be an octopus.
“That’s how we realize that the world’s oldest octopus is actually a fossil nautilus, not an octopus,” Clements says.
Sounds like some scientists have ink on their face.