{"id":519103,"date":"2026-04-08T07:33:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T07:33:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/519103\/"},"modified":"2026-04-08T07:33:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T07:33:07","slug":"earliest-known-octopus-is-not-an-octopus-after-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/519103\/","title":{"rendered":"Earliest known octopus is not an octopus after all"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The fossil was discovered at a site at Mazon Creek in Illinois, US, with the first analysis of it published in 2000.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Scientists thought the fossil showed eight arms, fins and other features typical of an octopus.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Synchrotron imaging, a modern technique that uses beams of light brighter than the sun, was used to scan the fossil, revealing new details within the rock.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The teeth revealed matched those of a fossil nautiloid that was found at the same site.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">These findings mean that data now supports octopuses appearing during the Jurassic period, much later than thought.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Scientists now believe the split between octopuses and their 10-armed relatives happened in the Mesozoic era, not hundreds of millions of years earlier as previously thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The fossil was discovered at a site at Mazon Creek in Illinois, US, with the first analysis of&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":519104,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[59,90,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-519103","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=519103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519103\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/519104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=519103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=519103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=519103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}