Are Octopi Actually Aliens?

No, they're not. See you next week.

Okay, hang on, I'm not quite finished yet.

Pictured: Not an alien

The octopus. They're very strange creatures, and there's nothing on Earth quite like them. That's part of the reason they're so captivating to people. So is it possible that the cause of the octopuses otherworldliness is that they're from another world? That's what a group of scientists are claiming, and while you might want to dismiss them as being crazy, they have credentials. These are legitimate scientists, and they've published a legitimate study.

Things start off fine, they note the dramatic differences in the octopus, compared with squid and cuttlefish, their closest relatives, and the nautilus, the cephalopod common ancestor. And that's fine, octopi do have many features that sort of just appeared, evolutionarily speaking. That sort of thing is unusual in biology. But where things go south is when they claim that the reason for this is extraterrestrial influence during the Cambrian explosion, either from alien viruses that modified squid DNA, or from full-on fertilized octopus eggs, suspended in deep freeze for millions of years on an alien comet, landing on Earth and suddenly coming to life. It's a wild theory, and if you ignore the fact that we know the octopus genome, and the split between octopus and squid happened 135 million years ago instead of 500 million years ago, and if you squint, it almost makes sense.

Okay, it really doesn't make any sense. But this wild, off-the-wall theory does serve a point. There's still a lot of science we don't know, and sometimes, you need wild theories to push the boundaries of traditional thinking. Oh sure, most will be wildly wrong (see: octopuses are aliens), but occasionally, they'll be right, or at least point us in the right direction.