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Eight-Armed Animal Preceded Dinosaurs

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the doc-oc-uber-alles dept.

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."

8 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Funny

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  2. Eight-armed creature by MisterSquirrel · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Eight-armed creature by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  3. Re:FSM by Andr+T. · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'll believe ID when they find a fossilized watch.

    --

    Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.

  4. Re:FSM by nawcom · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'll believe ID when they find a fossilized watch.

    It's even still hard to believe... http://www.fossil.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ContentView?langId=-1&storeId=12052&catalogId=10052&categoryId=30005&parent_category_rn=30000&N=0&contentPageHtml=watch_non_catalog

  5. Re:Octospiders by butterflysrage · · Score: 5, Funny

    what does God need with a starship?

    --
    the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
  6. Re:four accidental or metabolically efficient? by Paaskonijn · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm at a loss to think of any two-limbed complex organisms.

    Pirates!

  7. Re:computer evolution experiments by Danny+Rathjens · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here they are. He has some pretty cool videos showing the different types of locomotion that resulted. I love the one that grows really tall and falls over; it certainly achieved some fast movement over a short distance - but a bit of an evolutionary dead end. :)
    http://www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html