Scientists have named a vampire squid fossil after US President Joe Biden.
The approximately 328-million-year-old fossil discovered in the US state of Montana was donated to the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada in 1988 and then lay in a drawer there for a long time, the New York Times reported, citing Christopher Whalen, a paleontologist at American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Along with his colleague Neil Landman, Whalen named the fossil “Syllipsimopodi bideni” to commemorate Biden’s presidency and “because they were encouraged by his plans to address climate change and advance scientific research,” Whalen was quoted as saying. Animal species have also been named after previous US Presidents such as Donald Trump or Barack Obama.
According to his own statements, scientist Whalen accidentally came across the fossil in the museum in Canada, examined it more closely – and saw that there were even suction cups on the animal’s ten arms. The fossil is of a previously unknown species — the oldest of a group of animals that includes octopuses and vampire squid, Whalen and Landman argued in an article in the scientific journal Nature Communications.