A vampire squid fossil has been named after President Joe Biden.
Scientists honoured the 46th President of the United States by naming the 328-million-year-old syllipsimopodi bideni, according to a study from Nature Communications.
The fossil was uncovered in the Bear Gulch Limestone in Fergus County, Montana and donated to the Ontario Museum in Canada in 1988. However, it was only recently that the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Yale University looked at the fossil.
According to the researchers, the syllipsimopodi bideni existed over 300 million years ago in the Carboniferous era.
The author of the study, Christopher 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.”
