Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Scientists find "fossil sneeze": octopus w/ink & suckers

No bones, no hard tissue, octopi are not the likeliest candidates for fossilization, and yet, some scientists from Berlin claim they have found the complete rock-hard remains of one. Complete. With ink and suckers. My initial response was, "Am I to be one of those suckers?" But they seem to have persuaded others in their field that their discovery is legit.
What most surprised Fuchs and his colleagues Giacomo Bracchi and Robert Weis was how similar the specimens are to modern octopus. "These things are 95 million years old, yet one of the fossils is almost indistinguishable from living species," Fuchs said.

So, what does one call an octopus that has gone beyond ossification, how does one label a cephalopod of stone? Fossipus? Octopossil? Cephalopossil? Rock of Inkjets?

Any way you look at this, it's cool as Cthulhu.

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