🤩 This took my breath away 😮💨 could watch these anxient creatures forever! 🎥: @schmidtocean/IG ✍️ @schmidtocean - “Our extremely distant cousins might be the closest we’ll ever come to meeting an intelligent alien. At least, that’s the case made by Australian philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith ( @insta_zoan ) All living creatures, including us, have a common ancestor with any other living being — if you travel far enough back through time. To find a common ancestor between humans and octopuses, you’d have to travel to the Ediacaran Period, about 600 million years ago. In his book “Other Minds,” Godfrey-Smith traces our shared lineage back to when no organisms had made it onto dry land. The largest creatures might have been jellyfish and sponges. Here, in a time of violent mountain-building and soft, squishy bodies, our paths diverged with that of the cephalopods. We evolved into vertebrates, into mammals, into humans. They evolved into invertebrates, into mollusks, into octopuses. To Godfrey-Smith, “If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over.” An international team of scientists spotted this beautiful octopus during the #salasygomez expedition east of Motu Motira Hiva. Have you seen anything so ethereal? So stunning? Those arms and webbing— wow wow wow! Brb watching again. #octopus #cephalopod #invertebrates #othermindsbook #oceanreads #oceanworld