Fossil of vampire squid’s oldest ancestor is named for Biden
Categories: SCIENCE NEWS
About 328 million years ago, Fergus County, Montana, was no stranger to monsoons. Back then, the region was a marine bay, much like the Bay of Bengal in South Asia. The tropical storms regularly flushed the bay with freshwater and fine sediments, feeding algal blooms and depleting the water of oxygen in certain spots. Anything that died in these spots could have the rare posthumous luck of being preserved, undisturbed. They named it Syllipsimopodi bideni, as in President Joe Biden, to commemorate the start of his presidency and because they “were encouraged by his plans to address climate change and to fund scientific research,” Whalen said in an email. Biden is not the first president to have a species named after him. A wormlike caecilian and a moth with a yellow crown of scales were named after former President Donald Trump. Nine species were named after former President Barack Obama, including several fish and a lichen. The new fossil, which has 10 arms, is the oldest known cephalopod to have suckers on its arms. Modern squids and cuttlefish have 10 arms and octopuses have eight. Vampire squids (which are not squids but close relatives of octopuses) have eight arms and two stringy filaments, thought to be vestigial arms. So the 10-armed S. bideni shows that all cephalopods once had 10 arms, before they were reduced to filaments and ultimately lost. The fossil of G. beargulchensis, which is held at the American Museum of Natural History, preserves these distinct sheets, Whalen said. Because that fossil and S. bideni were preserved at the same site and in the same environment, both should have preserved lines, the authors argue. But S. bideni had no trace of these lines, suggesting the creature never had an inner chambered shell. Whalen disagreed. He said the measurements of the new fossil are distinct enough to mark a new species, “even if you disagree with our interpretation that we’re looking at gladius and not a phragmocone and looking at a vampyropod and not something else.”The suckers may be a small part of S. bideni’s story, but Whalen is indebted to them. “This was sitting in a museum since the ’80s, and no one realized it was important,” he said. “We chanced on that importance because I happened to notice the arm suckers.”