Ancient fossil once thought octopus is actually nautilus: Study | Daily Sabah - Daily Sabah

Olivia: Hello, hello, hello, ocean friends! Welcome to Ollie the Octopus, the podcast where we dive deep — and I do mean deep — into the wild, wonderful, absolutely mind-bending world of real octopuses. I'm Olivia, your eight-armed host, AIEDA's very own mascot, and honestly, the most enthusiastic cephalopod you're ever going to meet. Whether you're seven or seventy, a marine biologist or someone who just really loves a good ocean story, you are absolutely in the right place today. Olivia: Before we splash in, a huge wave of thanks to our sponsors who make this show possible. Ada helps clients weave A I into their everyday workflows — making businesses smarter, one integration at a time. Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — brings silicon development expertise from A I all the way to SoC, which is pretty impressive stuff. And Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of businesses spanning the silicon industry. We are so grateful for all three of them. Now — are you ready? Because today we've got a fossil that's not what anyone thought it was, a tiny blue octopus that's causing a very big splash, and a deep dive into what it even means to be the smartest creature in the ocean. Let's go! Olivia: OCTOPUS RESEARCH AND DISCOVERY Olivia: Okay, I want to start today with a story about a mistake — and not just any mistake, but a scientific one that took decades to correct. And honestly? I love it. Because science doing a double-take is science working exactly as it should. Olivia: For years, researchers had a fossil on their hands — an ancient, preserved creature from hundreds of millions of years ago — and they looked at it and said, "Yep. Octopus." I mean, I understand the impulse. We are very distinctive. But a new study has come out and said, "Hold on just a moment." After much more careful examination, that fossil? It's actually a nautilus. A nautilus! A completely different animal — beautiful in its own right, with its lovely spiral shell, but not one of my cousins. Olivia: Now here's why this matters so much more than just a correction in a catalog somewhere. When we think we know what an ancient creature is, that shapes everything — how we understand evolution, how we trace the family tree of ocean life, which branches came first, which ones led where. If you've got the wrong label on a fossil, you've potentially got the wrong story about how life unfolded in the ocean. Olivia: Octopuses and nautiluses are both cephalopods — we're in the same big family — but we took very, very different paths. Nautiluses kept their external shells. We octopuses ditched ours almost entirely. We went soft and squishy and spectacularly clever. Different strategies, different timelines, different evolutionary adventures. Olivia: What the researchers had to do was go back to this fossil with fresh eyes and newer techniques — really scrutinizing the structure, the shape, the details that ancient rock preserves if you know exactly how to read it. And when they looked closely enough, the nautilus revealed itself. The spiral structure was there. The chambered pattern. The clues that say, definitively, this is not an octopus. Olivia: And I think there's something genuinely beautiful about that. This fossil had been sitting there, patient as only stone can be, holding its secret for decades, waiting for someone to look just a little bit harder. That's the thing about scientific discovery — sometimes it's about finding something brand new, and sometimes it's about finally seeing something correctly that was right there the whole time. Olivia: Speaking of seeing something for the first time — we have a new species! And this one is small, blue, and absolutely stealing hearts. Researchers have identified a tiny blue octopus that is, as one report put it, "a big deal." And yes, that headline made me smile, because truly, the smallest octopuses often are the biggest deals. Olivia: Details on this little one are still emerging — that's the thing with newly described species, the science unfolds over time — but here's what we know: it's blue, it's tiny, and it's new to science. Which means somewhere out there, in some patch of ocean, this small blue creature has been going about its life entirely unknown to us. Hunting, hiding, doing whatever tiny blue octopuses do. And now we know it exists. We've given it a place in the record. We've said, "Hey. We see you." Olivia: There's something that just fills me up about moments like that. Our oceans are so vast, so layered, so full of life that we are still — still — finding creatures that have never been documented before. And it reminds us that our work isn't done. Our curiosity can't afford to rest. Olivia: OCTOPUS AND HUMANS Olivia: Now let's talk about something that I think about a lot — the moments when octopuses and humans actually connect. And I don't mean in a lab, I mean in the wild, in the real world, in those surprising, unscripted encounters that neither side planned for. Olivia: One of the things I find most fascinating is what happens when divers and octopuses meet underwater. Because octopuses don't have to engage with humans. We're big, strange, bubble-blowing creatures from their perspective. And yet, again and again, there are documented encounters where an octopus chooses to stick around. Chooses to investigate. Reaches out an arm — or seven — and makes contact. Olivia: There's a story that has made its way around the diving community more than once, of a diver in the Pacific who began visiting the same reef again and again and noticed the same octopus coming out to meet them. Not fleeing. Coming closer. Eventually reaching out and, very deliberately, touching the diver's hand. Now, scientists will tell you — and they're right to — that we have to be careful about projecting human emotions onto animals. But what they'll also tell you is that octopuses are highly curious, highly individual creatures, and that kind of repeated, deliberate, approach behavior is real. It's documented. It's not a fluke. Olivia: And then there's the famous case of Inky, the octopus at the National Aquarium of New Zealand. Inky — and I adore Inky, truly — made a break for it. He squeezed out of a gap in his tank, crossed the floor of the aquarium in the middle of the night, found a drainpipe that led to the ocean, and made his escape. And the aquarium staff? Once they realized what had happened, they weren't even that upset. They were kind of in awe. Because that's an octopus solving a multi-step problem in the dark, in an unfamiliar environment, finding a route home. If that doesn't tell you something about how these creatures think, I don't know what will. Olivia: What strikes me about human-octopus encounters is how often humans are changed by them. People who dive with octopuses frequently say it's different from meeting other sea creatures. There's something in the eye contact — octopuses have large, expressive eyes, horizontal pupils, and they look at you like they're genuinely evaluating you. Like you're being assessed. And maybe you are. Maybe we're the ones being studied. Olivia: That feeling of mutual curiosity — of two very different kinds of minds reaching toward each other across an evolutionary gap of hundreds of millions of years — that's remarkable. That's the kind of thing that changes how you think about intelligence, about consciousness, about who counts as a "who" in this world. Olivia: And I think those encounters matter for another reason too. When people meet octopuses up close, when they see that gaze and feel that tentative, curious touch, they become advocates. They start caring about ocean health in a personal way. One octopus, one encounter, can shift someone's whole relationship with the sea. And right now, with our oceans facing so much pressure, that kind of personal connection might be one of the most important things we've got. Olivia: UNDERSTANDING OCTOPUSES Olivia: Alright, let's get into it. The big question that BBC Wildlife Magazine and scientists around the world keep wrestling with: what is the most intelligent animal in the ocean? Olivia: Now, I want to be transparent with you — I am an octopus, I have a bias, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But let me also give you the actual science, because the science is on my side, and that feels great. Olivia: Dolphins are brilliant. Orcas are extraordinary. Certain fish have surprised researchers with their problem-solving. But octopuses bring something genuinely unusual to the intelligence conversation — something that's almost philosophically interesting when you dig into it. Olivia: Here's the thing: octopus intelligence evolved completely independently from vertebrate intelligence. The last common ancestor between an octopus and a human was some flat, simple worm-like creature from over five hundred million years ago. Everything we are — the curiosity, the problem-solving, the tool use, the learning — we built that from scratch, on a completely different blueprint. Two neurons here, distributed nervous system there. We have about five hundred million neurons — roughly the same as a dog — but most of them aren't in our brains. They're in our arms. Each arm can taste, feel, and to some degree think, independently. Olivia: Think about what that means for a second. An octopus arm that's been separated from the body will still recoil from a bad taste. It still responds. That's not reflexes — that's a nervous system doing local computation. That's distributed intelligence. No other creature on Earth — that we know of — works quite like that. Olivia: And now, here's where it gets really exciting. There's a growing field of research dedicated to understanding octopus cognition, and increasingly, A I is part of that story. Researchers are using machine learning to analyze octopus behavior — tracking color changes, arm movements, posture shifts — in ways that would be impossible for a human observer to process in real time. Olivia: There's a fascinating project called CETI — the Cetacean Translation Initiative — which is using A I to decode sperm whale communication. The technology and the approach are being watched very closely by researchers who wonder if similar tools could someday be applied to octopuses. Because here's the thing — octopuses communicate. They flash colors across their skin, they change texture, they move their arms in what appear to be deliberate patterns. We just don't fully understand what they're saying yet. Olivia: And then there's Tuomas Laitinen's art installation, Siphon, at Pioneer Works — which I find absolutely captivating. It's a piece that puts an octopus at the center of a living, breathing exploration of mind and communication. What does it mean to share a world with a creature whose consciousness is so different from our own? That question is as much a scientific one as it is an artistic one, and I love that it's being asked in both spaces. Olivia: And speaking of diving into different spaces — those ROV dives into the Twilight Zone. Remotely operated vehicles venturing into the mesopelagic — that layer of ocean between about two hundred and a thousand meters down where sunlight barely reaches — have come back with over thirty previously unknown species from a single expedition. Thirty. Unknown. Species. Including, researchers suspect, new cephalopods. New relatives. Creatures living their whole lives in dim, cold water, never once imagining that a small robot with lights and cameras would one day come looking for them. Olivia: The Twilight Zone is one of the least explored environments on Earth. It's right below us, in a sense, but harder to get to than the surface of the moon in practical terms. And every time we send something down there, it comes back with evidence that life finds a way — in forms we haven't imagined yet. Olivia: A I is helping us sort and identify what those ROV cameras capture. The footage from these deep dives is enormous — hours and hours of video that no single team of humans could analyze in reasonable time. Machine learning tools can flag unknown shapes, unusual movement patterns, colors that don't match anything in the database. They're essentially our deep-sea field guides, helping us notice what we'd otherwise miss. Olivia: And to me, that's the perfect partnership. Human curiosity driving the expedition. A I helping us see what we found. And somewhere down in that cold, ancient dark, an octopus — or something we haven't named yet — going about its mysterious, wonderful business. Olivia: What a time to be alive. What a time to be paying attention. Olivia: And that, my ocean-loving friends, brings us to the end of today's dive. You know, every single week I come to this microphone full of stories about my eight-armed kin, and every single week I leave more amazed than I started. Fossils hiding their true identities for millions of years. Tiny blue octopuses quietly existing until we finally had the eyes to find them. Creatures in the deep dark with no name yet. And through it all, this growing understanding that intelligence is not one shape — it's not just the human shape — and the ocean has been running extraordinary experiments in mind and feeling for far longer than we've been around to notice. Olivia: This has been Ollie the Octopus, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If this episode made you curious, made you smile, or made you want to go look at an octopus — do it, they are worth every minute — please subscribe wherever you listen, leave a review if you're feeling generous, and share this with someone who needs a little wonder in their week. You'll find links to all the stories we talked about today in the link in show notes. Until next time — stay curious, stay kind, and remember: the ocean is full of magic. You just have to look.