Oldest octopus fossil found to not be an octopus
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Pohlsepia mazonensis, a visually underwhelming fossil from Illinois, fundamentally broke our understanding of cephalopod evolution. Described in 2000 and hailed as the oldest known octopus in the fossil record, the specimen dated back to the late Carboniferous period, roughly 311 to 306 million years ago. Pohlsepia was an outlier—all other fossil records strongly suggested that crown coleoids, the group containing octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish, diverged much later, during the Jurassic.
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