Octopus fossils

As you can imagine, the boneless body of the octupus rarely becomes part of the fossil record. Science Daily calls it "about as unlikely as finding a fossil sneeze." There have been a handful preserved, some with ink and intact suckers, but for the first time an octopus fossil has been found - in 95-million-year-old Cretaceous rock in Lebanon - that is almost indistinguishable from modern species. This remarkable find (pictured above) pushes back the origins of modern octopus by tens of millions of years. Other octo-fossils are pictured below.