Identifying a new octopus species is a many-armed endeavor that depends on carefully assessing a suite of internal and external characteristics. The emperor Dumbo is the first large organism ever fully described using nondestructive methods. He snipped a small tissue sample from a damaged arm tip for DNA analysis, and preserved the entire specimen in formaldehyde.īut once he was off the ship and back in Germany, Ziegler did something unusual: he put the octopus in an MRI, and used a CT scanner to look at its eyes and hard beak. So he photographed the octopus and measured various anatomical features, including its suckers and the webbing between its arms. Given how far the ship was from where other Dumbo octopuses are known to live in the Pacific, he suspected this was a species new to science. Ziegler is a sea urchin specialist, but he knew he was looking at something noteworthy. The pair of fins on the side of its body clearly marked it as a Dumbo octopus-so-called because the fins resemble the oversized ears of Disney’s cartoon elephant. The creature was about the size of a human head and had eight webbed arms. Then Ziegler spied the octopus, a pinkish lump. Ziegler had been invited to deal with the life forms the geologists inevitably scraped up with the rocks they sought.Īt first glance, the haul on that July day in 2016 seemed unpromising: not even many rocks to speak of. The first time he really saw the octopus, it was on his computer screen, where the arches of its blood vessels and the folds of its gills-illuminated in exquisite digital detail-were poised to shake up the tradition-bound field of taxonomy.įive summers ago, Ziegler, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Bonn in Germany, was the lone biologist tagging along on an expedition collecting rocks from the depths of the Pacific to gain insights into plate tectonics. The first time Alexander Ziegler saw the octopus he would go on to call Grimpoteuthis imperator, it was tangled in a steel net on the deck of a research vessel in the North Pacific Ocean, having just been hauled up from a depth of more than 4,000 meters. Authored byĪp| 950 words, about 4 minutes Share this article Photo by Alexander Ziegler Seeing Inside the Newly Discovered Emperor Dumbo Octopus The discovery of the emperor Dumbo octopus stemmed from the use of nondestructive MRI and CT scans-techniques that could revolutionize taxonomy. An MRI scan of the newly discovered emperor Dumbo octopus shows its internal structures in detail.