I can't even trace my family line back four generations, but of course octopi, despite not having an intelligable language to scientists, no written history, no cemetry and no heirlooms to speak of their roots have been linked to one species of octopus living in the Southern Ocean 30 million years ago. Even better, their great-great-great-pi grandmother and grandfather are still around. All right, not literally, and not even in photos. But the species that links all octupi together is still around, and only lives in the Southern Ocean.
The research was done as part of the Octopus Family Gathering which is part of the Census of Marine Life (CoML) due to be complete in 2010. (For the record, there is a CoML but there is not an OFG.)
The name of the octopus who gave birth to a hundreds of species isMegaleledone setebos, a shallow water octopus. Sea ice helped push oxygen and nutrients into the depths of the oceans, and octupi followed the trail, eventually spreading around the globe. Sort of like the Eurasians, only maybe less violent.
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