Cirrate Octopus
The Lord Geekington: Cirrate Octopodes
In an attempt to alleviate that guilt, I'd like to introduce the cirrate octopodes. Along with other groups such as, say,
mesoplodonts
, these are among my (increasingly numerous) favorite animals. Predictably for an animal I like, cirrates are publicly poorly known and anatomically bizarre compared to the much more familiar incirrate octopodes. The namesake of cirrates are filament-like cirri of variable length and development paired with the suckers. Since these are not always readily visible, I'd suggest the easiest way to differentiate a cirrate from incirrate is that the former has a pair of fins used in lieu of jet propulsion.
From the
Friday Cephalopod
at Pharyngula taken in turn from
The Deep
by Claire Nouvian. It was mis-identified as a deep-sea "squid".
These may seem like rather bizarre characteristics but they are actually ancestral and apparently quite ancient. A third group of Octopodiformes,
Vampyromorpha
or vampire squids, diverged from the cirrates and incirrates some time in the Paleozoic (250+ mya) according to a recent molecular analysis by Strugnell et al 2006. As demonstrated by the excellent
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