New species related to vampire squid discovered by Chinese scientists

Chinese scientists have announced the discovery of a new species related to the vampire squid found in the South China Sea. Researchers from the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences published their groundbreaking findings in the journal Zootaxa. Through detailed morphological and genetic analysis, they identified significant differences from known vampire squid species, confirming this remarkable discovery as a distinct new species.

In biological classification, the vampire squid was previously the only widely recognized extant species in the order Vampyromorphida. In 1903, German marine biologist Carl Chun first discovered the vampire squid in the deep sea, where it typically lives at depths of 600 to 900 meters. At such depths, light is almost non-existent, and the oxygen content of the water remains very low.

The new species was collected by Chinese scientists at depths of 800 to 1,000 meters southeast of Hainan Island in September 2016. The research team compared its morphology with that of the vampire squid and found significant differences in the tail shape, lower beak structure, and photophore positions.

Genetic analysis revealed that the species and the vampire squid are two distantly related branches of the same evolutionary tree, confirming the collected specimen as a new species and making it the second known extant species in the order Vampyromorphida.

On March 8, 2022, researchers from the American Museum of Natural History and Yale University published a study in the scientific journal Nature Communications, analyzing a fossil of an ancient 10-armed cephalopod. They suggested that this ancient creature which lived 328 million years ago is the oldest known ancestor of both octopuses and vampire squid. This fossil study confirmed previous scientific hypotheses that the order Vampyromorphida originally had 10 arms, which gradually evolved to the current 8 arms.