A prehistoric fossil previously thought to belong to the world’s oldest octopus has been reclassified as something else, after scientists discovered the remains actually belonged to a different type of sea creature.
“It turns out the world’s most famous octopus fossil was never an octopus at all,” Thomas Clements, the lead researcher behind the new discovery and a zoology professor at England’s University of Reading, said in a statement.
Clements’ newly published research concludes that fossilized remains listed by Guinness World Records as the earliest known octopus belong instead to a relative of a nautilus, a cephalopod with both tentacles and a shell.
Clements told The Associated Press that the fossil, Pohlsepia mazonensis, has long been the subject of scientific debate.
“It’s a very difficult fossil to interpret,” he said. “To look at it, it kind of just looks like a white mush.
“If you look at it and you are a cephalopod researcher and you’re interested in everything octopus, it does superficially look a lot like a deep-water octopus.”
The creature, a blob about the size of a human hand, was found in the Mazon Creek area of Illinois, about 50 miles southwest of Chicago, that is rich in fossils from a period before dinosaurs walked the Earth.