Octopuses were around before dinosaurs, fossil find suggests

A fossil unearthed in Montana is approximately 330 million years old.

The researchers found that the ancient creature lived millions of years earlier than they had thought.

The fossil has 10 limbs, the modern one has eight, each with two rows of suckers. It probably lived in the ocean bay.

It's very rare to find soft tissue fossils, except in a few places, according to a zoologist who was not involved in the study. It pushes back the ancestry far more than was previously known.

The Royal Ontario Museum in Canada received the specimen after it was discovered in Montana.

The fossil was overlooked in a drawer for a long time. The 10 tiny limbs were encased in limestone.

Christopher Whalen, an American Museum of Natural History palaeont, said that the ink sac was probably used to squirt out a dark liquid cloak to evade predators.

Vampire squid is a confusingly named marine creature that's much closer to an octopus than a squid.

The authors said that the oldest known definitive is from around 250m years ago.

The scientists named the fossil after Biden.

The scientists said they intended to compliment the president's science and research priorities.