'Gigantic' ancient octopus used jaws to crush prey and hunted alongside the dinosaurs 100M years ago: study

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. ©2026 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset. Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions. Legal Statement. Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by LSEG. Canadian paleontologists recently discovered Mosura fentoni, a 506 million-year-old predator resembling a moth. The discovery offers insights into extinct radiodonts' anatomy. (Source: Royal Ontario Museum) Octopuses’ earliest relatives that lived 100 million years ago may have been "gigantic" predators that hunted alongside dinosaurs, according to new research. Although scientists previously believed that the earliest finned octopuses lived around 15 million years ago, researchers with Hokkaido University found fossilized jaws inside Late Cretaceous rock samples, according to a study published in the journal Science Thursday. Because octopuses are soft-bodied animals, they don’t fossilize well except for the jaw bones, making their evolutionary history difficult to trace, the researchers explained in a news release. The researchers used high-resolut