Ten-armed prehistoric squid older than dinosaurs named after President Joe Biden
dailystar.co.ukUS President Joe Biden is the oldest man ever to enter the White House - but even so it seems a bit harsh to compare him to a 328 million-year-old squid.
Syllipsimopodi bideni is the oldest known member of the cephalopod family – a group of marine animals that includes the octopus as well as the squid.
It looks quite unlike your average calamari though, possessing ten tentacles instead of the eight that most modern cephalopods make do with.Additional appendages would have made it a more efficient predator, say the team at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.Dr Christopher Whalen, the lead author of the scientific paper that first described the fossil species, says he named the creature because he was "encouraged by the plans President Biden put forward to counter anthropogenic climate change, and his general sentiment that politicians should listen to scientists".
The creature – which would have lived long before the earliest dinosaurs – was unearthed at the Mississippian Bear Gulch in Montana – one of the best-preserved fossil sites in the world.Bideni was a primitive vampire squid.
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