Podcast 333 - Think Big

The gang discusses two papers about fossil cephalopods. The first paper uses new methods to reassess the taxonomy of what was previously considered to be the oldest octopod, and the second paper uses preserved beaks to reconstruct large body sizes of Mesozoic octopods. Meanwhile, Amanda keeps it within Michigan, James brings up THE cephalopod talk, and Curt ascends.   Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition): Our friends talk about two papers that look at animals with many arms and a sharp mouth. The first paper looks at some parts of a very old animal with many arms. People thought that it might be an animal with many arms that does not have a hard home to live inside and carry around with it. But this paper looks over that animal and finds that the animal is an animal that lived in a hard home that it carried, but after it died it fell out of that home when it started to fall to pieces. The second paper looks at another animal with many arms and uses the size of the mouth to see how big the animal was. They find that these animals with many arms were very very big. They also say that this means they were really sharp which the friends talk about a lot.   References: Clements, Thomas, et al. "Synchrotron data reveal nautiloid characters in Pohlsepia mazonensis, refuting a Palaeozoic origin for octobrachians." Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 293.2068 (2026). Ikegami, Shin, et al. "Earliest octopuses were giant top predators in Cretaceous oceans." Science 392.6796 (2026): 406-410.