95M-Year-Old Octopus Fossils Discovered

mmmscience writes "A new study published in Paleontology is a truly terrific find. Not only did a group of European scientists find a fossilized octopus, they found five complete fossils that show all eight legs in great detail, including a ghost of the characteristic suckers. The discovery of the 95-million-year-old specimens was made in Lebanon. 'What is truly astonishing to the scientists is how similar these ancient creatures are to their modern-day counterparts. Dirk Fuchs, lead author on the study stated, "These things are 95 million years old, yet one of the fossils is almost indistinguishable from living species."'"

Comments

Re:Retract the pods! Prepare to jump.

[Red Flayer]

I'd be more concerned about their ability to change color to match their surroundings. Sounds like a career bureaucrat to me.

Re:How does evolution detract from God?

[tjstork]

By its very nature, a supernatural being cannot be tested and no direct physical evidence can be brought forth to validate its existence.

NO, we will all find out for ourselves when we die. Either there will be black and nothing, as our brain shuts down, or there will be some sort of a spirit moving onwards. If you want to know right away, if there is a God, shoot yourself. I just don't need that verification right now!

you are starting with a conclusion... science ends with one.

That's actually not true either. It's not how people work. Everyone that invents some theory has a preconceived vision of how the universe works and they put out there vision bolstered by some experiment or set of experiments. It's only the notion of test that gives us a winner and validates a given model and then only for a particular domain.

But the larger point is that science itself, despite its falsifiability, still requires a faith. The minimum notion of science is that if someone else does something, you can do that thing yourself. It is this and this alone that makes science fact. While this may be theoretically true, its certainly not practically true for most people. If the LHC people come out tomorrow and say they found the Higgs, how could I, myself, ever test that? The Higgs could have just about any number put to it and it would not make any difference to me as I could never know the absolute truth firsthand. You have to have faith in the process and the people and the institutions and the education, all that somehow its not being made up. For a lot of inquiry, you can assume that this is not the case. But, for some things, where there is big money involved, political preference, then we cannot be so sure, and those that are, doing so out of faith.

Absent faith, science would fall apart just as fast as some religions do, and I would be willing to bet that the level of cynicism and distrust and lack of faith in our society has more to do with public decline in science than people realize.