A weird prehistoric squid with ten arms has been named after US President Joe Biden. The vampire squid-like creature is the oldest ancestor of cephalopods - which also include octopae.
Syllipsimopodi bideni was armed with two more limbs than its descendants today. It roamed the oceans 328 million years ago and had 10 arms, fins, and rows of suckers to clutch prey.
Additional appendages would have made it a more efficient predator, say the team at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The species was unearthed at the Mississippian Bear Gulch in Montana - one of the best preserved fossil sites in the world.
It was a primitive vampire squid - they do not suck or drink blood but have dark skin that connects the arms - resembling a cape. The discovery sheds fresh light on evolution - pushing back the age of the group by nearly 82 million years.
Christopher Whalen, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in Yale’s department of earth and planetary sciences and at the American Museum of Natural History, said: “This is the first and only known vampyropod to possess 10 functional appendages.”
Vampyropods are soft-bodied cephalopods that typically have eight arms and an internalised shell or fin supports. Because they do not have hard structures, fossils of the creatures are not very common.
The new study is based on an exceptionally well preserved vampyropod fossil from the collections of the Royal Ontario Museum, which was originally discovered in what is now Montana, America. The specimen extends the fossil record of the group by about 82 million years.
Dr Whalen said: “The arm count is one of the defining characteristics separating the 10-armed squid and cuttlefish line (Decabrachia) from the eight-armed octopus and vampire squid line (Vampyropoda). We have long understood that octopuses achieve the eight-arm count through elimination of the two filaments of vampire squid, and that these filaments are vestigial arms.
“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 10 arms.”
Two of the newly discovered animal’s arms are longer than the other eight, and its torpedo-shaped body is similar to that of today’s squids. The researchers speculate the animal used its longer arms to capture prey – smaller, shelled animals – and its shorter arms to confine and manipulate prey.
It has been named after the American president because the publication was accepted soon after his inauguration and the riots in the US Capitol. The findings are published in Nature Communications.
A host of strange animals have been named after his predecessors - including the tiny moth Neopalpa donaldtrumpi. The insect's yellow-and-white crown bore a striking resemblance to Donald J. Trump's distinctive coiffure.
Baracktrema obamai is a species of flatworm that is meant to honour Barack Obama. The parasitic wasp Heterospilus washingtoni is named after George Washington, a tiny shrew Heterospilus washingtoni hails Theodore Roosevelt - and there is the bluegrass darter Etheostoma jimmycarter.
Others include the beaded darter Etheostoma clinton after Bill Clinton and the wasp Heterospilus reagani after Ronald Reagan.
