Eight-Armed Animal Preceded Dinosaurs

Garimelda writes "Scientists have discovered what they believe is an eight-armed creature which colonized a large section of the world's oceans over 300 million years before the first dinosaurs emerged."

Comments

Eight-armed creature

[MisterSquirrel]

Eight-armed, in the sense that a starfish is five-armed. Not quite as sci-fi weird as the headline might sound.

Re:Eight-armed creature

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm... did many people interpret it as such?

I did. It's because of the "preceded dinosaurs" which made me think it was eight-armed vertebrates, for about two seconds. There's no reason to say "preceded dinosaurs" when it was significantly before dinosaurs and had nothing to do with them. You could say they preceded humans. It's just silly and confusing. It turns out these fossils are twice as old as dinos.

A better word would be "predate" which doesn't imply a close correlation in time.

"preceded dinosaurs"

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Given the time scales involved, that's kind of like saying "Alexander preceded Napoleon" -- I mean, it's true, but it leaves out a whole lot that happened in between.

Oh, never mind. The past is telescoped. There's old stuff (things that happened before my parents were born) older stuff (George Washington and other guys in funny clothes) very old stuff (King Arthur and Robin Hood) extremely old stuff (cavemen and dinosaurs) and, apparently, incredibly old stuff (before cavemen and dinosaurs -- who knew?) No point in asking people to maintain a sense of persepective.