220 Million Years of History Archaeologists Had to Rewrite

In 2025, the editors of Guinness World Records quietly deleted an entry that had been there for twenty-five years. The oldest octopus on the planet — except it wasn't an octopus. A single X-ray scan of a fossil from Illinois revealed it was actually a nautilus relative, and the mistake became a different discovery entirely: the oldest known soft tissues of that creature, beating the previous record by 220 million years. The find spent a quarter century behind museum glass with the wrong label, cited in serious scientific papers, taught to students. Nobody noticed until the right scanner came along.
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