A False Identity

An octopus was in the record book

For having been the oldest in its long

Ancestral pedigree. But what you look

Like isn’t what you were. The book was wrong:

Strange blobs are hard to tell apart when they’ve

Endured three hundred million years below

Immense dead weight of rock above their grave.

Dentition outs a record that is faux:

Exceeding nine in dental number thus

Negates the fossil’s octopoidal claim

To fame—it was instead a nautilus,

Inside a false identity … To name

The fossil specimen you found beneath

Your ancient rocks correctly, count its teeth!

 

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University who has returned to live in his native England. His poems have appeared in Current Conservation, the Ekphrastic Review, Light, Lighten Up Online, the New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, WestWard Quarterly and other journals. In 2025 he won the Children’s Unpublished category of the Eyelands Book Awards with Flora’s Flock and Other Stories to Read Aloud. The poem was prompted by the AP story “The world’s oldest octopus fossil isn’t an octopus after all, scientists say.”