Caufield scores 50th goal, Slafkovsky nets the winner as the Canadiens beat the Lightning 2-1

MONTREAL (AP) — Cole Caufield became the first Montreal player to score 50 goals in a season in more than three decades and Juraj Slafkovsky scored a tiebreaker with just over a minute remaining as the Canadiens beat the Tampa Bay Lightning 2-1 in a fight-filled game Thursday night.

Slafkovsky scored his 30th at 18:56 of the third period and Nick Suzuki had two assists to raise his season total to 70 for Montreal (47-22-10). Jakub Dobes made 17 saves for his seventh consecutive win.

Darren Raddysh scored for Tampa Bay (48-25-6), which lost its third straight game. Andrei Vasilevskiy stopped 19 shots.

Caufield beat Vasilevskiy with a wrist shot at 6:29 of the second period for the milestone goal in front of a frenzied crowd at the Bell Centre that included Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Caufield became the seventh Canadiens player to hit the 50-goal mark, and the first since Stéphane Richer in 1989-90.

Raddysh tied the game with 1:51 remaining in the third period with the goalie pulled before Slafkovsky scored with 64 seconds left on a pass from Suzuki.

The Canadiens, Lightning and Buffalo Sabres are locked in a three-way race for first place in the Atlantic Division with three regular-season games remaining for Montreal and Tampa Bay, and two left for Buffalo. Montreal moved two points ahead of Tampa Bay and two behind Buffalo for the division lead.

The game featured several scrums after the whistle, a spirited fight between Montreal’s Josh Anderson and Tampa Bay’s Declan Carlile, and seven 10-minute misconducts — culminating in 126 penalty minutes. The second period alone had more than 100, with players packing in to both penalty boxes.

Lightning: At the Boston Bruins on Saturday afternoon.

Canadiens: Host the Columbus Blue Jackets on Saturday.

AP NHL: https://apnews.com/hub/nhl

Tampa Bay Lightning goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy (88) makes a save against Montreal Canadiens' Kirby Dach (77) during first-period NHL hockey game action in Montreal, Thursday, April 9, 2026. (Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press via AP)

Tampa Bay Lightning goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy (88) makes a save during first-period NHL hockey game action against the Montreal Canadiens in Montreal, Thursday, April 9, 2026. (Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press via AP)

Montreal Canadiens goaltender Jakub Dobes (75) makes a save against Tampa Bay Lightning' Brayden Point (21) during the second period of an NHL hockey game in Montreal on Thursday, April 9, 2026. (Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press via AP)

Montreal Canadiens' Cole Caufield shoots during first-period NHL hockey game action against the Tampa Bay Lightning in Montreal, Thursday, April 9, 2026. (Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press via AP)

LONDON (AP) — A 300-million-year-old tentacled sea creature has lost its crown as the world’s oldest octopus, after scientists found evidence that it’s not an octopus at all.

Newly published research concludes that fossilized remains listed by Guinness World Records as the earliest known octopus belong instead to a relative of a nautilus, a cephalopod with both tentacles and a shell.

University of Reading zoologist Thomas Clements, the lead researcher behind the new findings, said the fossil, Pohlsepia mazonensis, has long been the subject of scientific debate.

“It’s a very difficult fossil to interpret,” he said. “To look at it, it kind of just looks like a white mush.

“If you look at it and you are a cephalopod researcher and you’re interested in everything octopus, it does superficially look a lot like a deep-water octopus.”

The creature, a blob about the size of a human hand, was found in the Mazon Creek area of Illinois, about 50 miles southwest of Chicago, that is rich in fossils from a period before dinosaurs walked the Earth.

Its identification by paleontologists as an octopus in 2000 upended ideas about the evolution of the eight-tentacled cephalopods, suggesting they emerged much earlier than previously thought. The next oldest-known octopus fossil is only about 90 million years old.

“It’s a huge gap,” Clements said. “And so that big gap got researchers sort of questioning, ‘Is this thing actually an octopus?”

To solve the mystery of the “weird blob,” Clements and his team used a synchrotron — which uses fast-moving electrons to create beams of light brighter than the sun — to look inside the fossil rock. They found a ribbon of teeth known as a radula that is common to all mollusks, including nautiluses and octopuses. Each row had 11 teeth. Octopuses have either seven or nine.

“This has too many teeth, so it can’t be an octopus,” Clements said. “And that’s how we realize that the world’s oldest octopus is actually a fossil nautilus, not an octopus.”

The teeth matched those of a fossil nautiloid called Paleocadmus pohli that had been found in the same area. Clements said the mistaken identification may have happened because the creature decomposed and lost its telltale shell before it was fossilized, complicating identification.

As a result of the findings published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Guinness World Records said it will no longer list Pohlsepia mazonensis as the earliest known octopus.

Managing Editor Adam Millward said the scientists had made “a fascinating discovery.”

“We will be resting the original ‘oldest octopus fossil’ title and look forward to reviewing this new evidence,” he said.

Pohlsepia mazonensis is named for its discoverer James Pohl, and is in the collection of the Field Museum in Chicago.

Paul Mayer, manager of the museum's collection of fossil invertebrates, said he was “a little surprised” by its new classification as a nautiloid, but noted that "people have been questioning whether it was an octopus ever since the original paper was first published in 2000.”

He said new technologies for scientific investigation had brought renewed interest in the Mazon Creek fossils.

“(That) is great for our collections and hopefully new discoveries will be made and new stories will be revealed,” Mayer said.

Clements said the museum should not be disappointed by the new evidence, which means it now has “the oldest soft tissue nautilus in the world.

“The Field Museum have a small collection of these ancient nautiluses, which I think as a cephalopod worker is probably the best thing ever,” he said.

FILE -Field Museum and Chicago's skyline is seen from Soldier Field prior to an NFL preseason football game between the Chicago Bears and the Tennessee Titans, Aug. 12, 2023, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Kamil Krzaczynski, File)