And not one mad scientist. Thirty-three RESPECTED scientists made the announcement.
If someone asked you to guess which, of all the species of living things on the planet, was most likely to be of extra-terrestrial origin, what would you say?
Duck-billed platypuses seemed like a pod-person thing couldn't decide between two different species and got stuck half-way.
Parrots are essentially mimicking our speech already, and bees shouldn't technically be able to fly, when you consider the wing-to-body-mass ratio.
The smarty-pants would probably say "humans", and to be fair, we can't disprove that right now, either.
However, according to
Newsweek, a group of 33 scientists from respected scientific institutions from around the world have come together to release a new study that reveals that.... drum roll please.... OCTOPUSES may have descended from organic alien material.
Seems a bit obvious now that we think about it, with all of their legs and inky guns and ability to camouflage and high intelligence.
The theory revolves around a mass extinction event around 544 million years ago (also known as the pre-Cambrian mass extinction event], and the subsequent massive uptick in a particular species, which has led the scientists to develop the theory that the new DNA arrived on the planet via asteroid, which doubled as life-ender for those already here, and life-starter for the new arrivals.
How the DNA got on the asteroid in the first place doesn't really come into discussion, but the authors of the study said "It takes little imagination to consider that the pre-Cambrian mass extinction event(s) was correlated with the impact of a giant life-bearing comet (or comets), and the subsequent seeding of Earth with new cosmic-derived cellular organisms and viral genes."
To be fair, the scientists themselves do refer to the theory as "fanciful", which we're pretty sure is scientist speak for "potentially make-believe".
Meanwhile, other scientists have responded to the study by saying it is "an interesting but controversial possibility", which we're pretty sure is scientist speak for "what have you been smoking, and can we have some?"
