What if..

[Crazierfox]

Octopus Ancestors Were Among the Earliest Animals on Earth, Report Says

Fossils found in Newfoundland throw back cephalopod evolution by tens of millions of years, but does a species' longevity speak to braininess?

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Be not proud, puny human. We go back maybe half a million years, if we count our small-brained ancestors. If we go all the way back to the arboreal rat-like animal that is the oldest known ancestor of primates, OK, we reach 65 million years or so. But octopi and their cephalopod cousins are among the oldest animals on Earth, going back well over half a billion years, and new research suggests their evolution began even earlier than thought – in the early Cambrian, even before the appearance of the arthropods.

Camouflaging in a Complex Environment—Octopuses Use Specific Features of Their Surroundings for Background Matching  

Living under intense predation pressure, octopuses evolved an effective and impressive camouflaging ability that exploits features of their surroundings to enable them to “blend in.” To achieve such background matching, an animal may use general resemblance and reproduce characteristics of its entire surroundings, or it may imitate a specific object in its immediate environment. Using image analysis algorithms, we examined correlations between octopuses and their backgrounds. Field experiments show that when camouflaging, Octopus cyanea and O. vulgaris base their body patterns on selected features of nearby objects rather than attempting to match a large field of view. Such an approach enables the octopus to camouflage in partly occluded environments and to solve the problem of differences in appearance as a function of the viewing inclination of the observer.

Octopus Intelligence And Skills  

 In a more general sense, scientists and philosophers alike have come to realize that octopuses and their coleoid relatives are interesting points of reference with which to compare other animal groups. Despite having diverged from vertebrates over 500 million years ago, coleoids convergently evolved several analogous structures (e.g., a camera eye, a statocyst equilibrium system) and abilities (e.g., long term memory, associative learning) that were once thought to be exclusive to vertebrates.