An octopus at the Palma Aquarium, in Palma, Mallorca, Spain. Credit: Morten Brekkevold, via Flickr/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0US President Joe Biden has a lot of things named after him, including a planet and a train station, but the most unusual one yet is an octopus. A cephalopod, whose ancestors roamed the oceans millions of years ago, was named after Biden on Tuesday, with its description published in Nature Communications.
Dating over 328 million years ago, Syllipsimopodi bideni now breaks the fossil record of the vampyropods, the group of cephalopods containing octopus and vampire squid, by over 82 million years. This suggests that the first cephalopods all had ten arms — two of which have been lost in the intervening period during the evolution of modern octopuses.
“This is the first and only known vampyropod to possess ten functional appendages,” saidDr. Christopher Whalen, the lead author of the description of the fossil species. “The arm count is one of the defining characteristics separating the Decabrachia, which include 10-armed squid and cuttlefish, from the Vampyropoda, which are made up of eight-armed octopus and vampire squid.”
An octopus whose ancestors roamed the oceans millions of years ago, was named after US President Joe Biden on Tuesday. The Syllipsimopodi bideni has ten arms, researchers said. Credit: K. Whalen/CC BY 4.0“We have long understood that octopuses achieved their eight-arm count through elimination of the two filaments of vampire squid, and that these filaments are vestigial arms,” Whalen said. “However, all previously reported fossil vampyropods preserving the appendages only have eight arms, so this fossil is arguably the first confirmation of the idea that all cephalopods ancestrally possessed ten arms.”
An octopus species with ten arms is “interesting”
“Vampyropods, as a group, have eight arms generally, so a species with 10 is quite interesting,” the Natural History Museum’s Fossil Invertebrates Curator Zoë Hughes, who was not involved with the description, said. “Furthermore, the quality of the taxonomy of the coleoids depends on the fossils that are found, as we generally base it on rare fossils.”
A fossil of the Syllipsimopodi bideni was uncovered in Montana, but it was only described as a new species in 2022 after the fossil was donated to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, in in the 1980s. Credit: Christopher Whalen/CC BY 4.0
The Neopalpa donaldtrumpi, a moth, was named after former US President Donald Trump. Credit: Dr. Vazrick Nazari, via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 4.0
More animal-themed Presidential honors
The species name, Syllipsimopodi bideni, honours Biden.
The vampyropod is the first species to be named after the president, but many of his predecessors have also shared the honor of having an organism named after them.
Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan had insects named after them while Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter had a fish, and Barack Obama had a flatworm. Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, also had an insect named after him, the Neopalpa donaldtrumpi, which was named after him due to its head’s resemblance to the former US president.