Megaleledone setebos, a shallow-water Antarctic octopus, is the closest living relative to the ancestor of deep-sea octopuses.
A large proportion of deep sea octopus species worldwide evolved from common ancestor species that still exist in the Southern Ocean, Census of Marine Life (CoML) scientists report today.
"Octopuses started migrating to new ocean basins more than 30 million years ago when, as Antarctica cooled and a large ice sheet grew, nature created a 'thermohaline expressway,' a northbound flow of tasty frigid water with high salt and oxygen content," scientists said as part of a report that will be released officially at the World Conference on Marine Biodiversity, in Valencia, Spain.
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