The earliest known ancestors of vampire squids and octopuses were found in Montana.
The age of the group was pushed back by about 81 million years by the cephalopod.
Our understanding of the evolution of octopuses is challenged by this. It has 10 arms, and it shows that the animals have lost two of their working appendages.
Christopher Whalen of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and Yale University says that this is the first and only known vampyropod to have 10 functional appendages.
The beastie was named after President Joseph Biden, who was inaugurated with plans to combat climate change.
Our understanding of evolutionary history is patchy. The soft and squishy creatures with no bones, only an internal shell of chitin, and such tissues do not often survive the ages, are called vampire squids.
Soft tissue is sometimes preserved in some types of exceptional fossil formations.
This is where Neil Landman and Whalen found the fossil of Syllipsimopodi.
The small impression of a soft body preserved for hundreds of millions of years shows that the history of today's animals was complex and fascinating.
There is a fossil in the Royal Ontario Museum. Christopher Whalen is a person.
Whalen says that their findings suggest that the earliest vampyropods looked like squids.
The new model for the evolution of internally-shelled cephalopods is offered by syllipsimopodi bideni.
There were hints that the previous oldest specimen may have been older.
The evolutionary history of an organisms can be determined by using the clock of the lineage, which shows the rate of biomolecules in DNA.
The discovery of Whalen and Landman corroborates the estimates that 10-armed Syllipsimopodi is the earliest known diverging vampyropod from the group. This common ancestor had 10 arms, according to these 10 arms.
The arm count is one of the defining characteristics of the 10-armed squid and cuttlefish line.
We have known for a long time that the eight arm count is achieved by elimination of the two vampire squid.
The first confirmation of the idea that all cephalopods possessed 10 arms was provided by this fossil, which shows that the appendages only have eight arms.
The researchers were able to determine that the two long arms of Syllipsimopodi were used to capture prey, while the shorter arms could have been used to hold and manipulate it.
The animal's body was torpedo-shaped, like modern squids, and it had fins that would have been big enough to help Syllipsimopodi swim.
A gladius is an internal shell structure found in squids and vampire squids. The stylets are bar-shaped structures that are used in Octopuses.
The researchers have been able to determine where Syllipsimopodi may have fit in.
Landman says that syllipsimopodi may have filled a niche similar to squids, a midlevel aquatic predator.
It is possible that it used its arms to pry small ammonoids out of their shells or ventured more inshore to prey on brachiopods, bivalves, or other shelled marine animals.
The research has been published.
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