A press release is out promoting a paper that reports one of the rarest of fossils: an octopus from the Late Cretaceous, about 100 million years ago. In a cute turn of phrase, it says that "preservation of an octopus as a fossil is about as unlikely as finding a fossil sneeze." But we have fossil jellyfish from the Cambrian and fossil raindrop marks, so maybe there are paleosneezes to be found out there too. Anyway, paleoblogger Cameron McCormick had it covered weeks ago, and he reinforces another truism of science journalism: what hits the news as a big surprise is usually long known to the expert community. Go see what bloggers can bring to the curious reader.
The kind of place you'd expect to have fossilized octopuses is called a lagerstatt. Lagerstätten are "universal graveyards" that can even preserve microbe fossils. The octopus beds are from a lagerstatt at Hakel and Hadjoula in Lebanon (a bit about them in French).
By the way, I need your help with lagerstätten. Is the singular "lagerstatt" or "lagerstätte"? It seems to be a word like tsunami, where some people say "tsunami" for the plural while most say "tsunamis."
Comments
Ah, but more importantly, what is the plural of octopus? I’d have said octopi but apparently I’m mistaken and it should be (pedantically) octopodes as octopus is not a simple Latin word of the second declension, but a Latinized form of the Greek word oktopous.
there are many fossil octi in the US they are found in the Mazon creek coal layer I personally know of a specimen My children donated to Brodnicki grade school in Justice,ILL.there are dozens of examples throughout the cook county forest preserve and they will show you where if you ask
Maybe there is no plural for Tsunami because you don’t usually have more than one at a time.