Fossil of Vampire Squid's Oldest Ancestor Is Named for Biden.

The oldest ancestor of modern octopuses lived 328 million years ago 
and had 10 arms.

About 328 million years ago, Fergus County, Mont., 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.

When an ancient octopus died in these waters, its soft, squishy body 
was buried and pristinely fossilized. The fossil was originally 
donated to the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada in 1988 but sat in a 
drawer for decades until Christopher Whalen, a paleontologist from 
the American Museum of Natural History in New York, pulled it out of 
a drawer and noticed its preserved arms. When he looked under a 
microscope, he saw small suckers dimpling the rock.

“That’s incredibly rare,” Dr. Whalen said.

Thomas Clements, a paleobiologist at the University of Birmingham in 
England, said, “The probability of these tiny little bags of water 
turning into fossils is just astronomically low.”

Intrigued, Dr. Whalen studied the fossil, expecting it would 
resemble other cephalopods found in the Montana limestone. But it 
turned out to be something quite different. Dr. Whalen and 
colleagues say the fossil represents the oldest known ancestor of 
vampyropods, a group that includes vampire squids and octopuses, 
pushing back the earliest evidence of the group by 82 million years. 
Dr. Whalen and Neil Landman, a curator emeritus at the museum, 
describe the new species in a paper published Tuesday in the journal 
Nature Communications.

They named it Syllipsimopodi bideni, as in President 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,” Dr. Whalen said in an email. Mr. 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 
President Donald J. Trump. Nine species were named after President 
Barack Obama, including several fish and a lichen.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/science/vampire-squid-biden.html