Old Fossil Named for Biden

Joseph Biden joins a select group of presidents who are commemorated in the lexicon of newly discovered species:

Heterospilus washingtoni is a parasitic wasp named after our first president. Trump lends his name to a nearly blind wormlike creature, Dermophis donaldtrumpi. Bush (the Younger), Cheney, and Rumsfeld each have a slime mold beetle named just for them.

A newly discovered (but extinct) species of vampire squid now bears the current president’s name as in Syllipsimopodi bideni.

The 328-million-year-old, 10-armed vampyropod fossil was found in Fergus County, Montana decades ago and donated to the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada in 1988, the New York Times reports. It sat in a drawer for years until paleontologist Christopher Whalen took a closer look under a microscope and found small suckers dimpling the rock.

The specimen is very different from other cephalopods found in the Montana limestone. Whalen and colleagues say the fossil is the oldest known ancestor of vampyropods – vampire squids and octopuses – some 82 million years older than previously thought.

They named it Syllipsimopodi bideni to commemorate the start of Biden’s presidency and because they “were encouraged by his plans to address climate change and to fund scientific research,” Whalen said. (Also, he is not young).

Photo credit: K. Whalen / Christopher Whalen