New teeny tiny octopus discovered off the Galápagos Islands

Scientists have made what could be one of the cutest discoveries of recent times - a new teeny tiny species of octopus the size of a golf ball.

The adorable little creature was found by scientists off the coast of the Galápagos Islands in 2015, but it's only just now been given an official name - Microeledone galapagensis - in a paper published in the scientific journal Zootaxa.

The Galapagos islands are where Charles Darwin made his famous discoveries about the theory of evolution.

They are well known for being home to lots of weird and wonderful creatures, and the newly discovered octopus definitely fits into these categories.

The octopus is also blue, which is a colour that's very rare to find in nature, and doesn't have an ink sac which most people would associate with octopuses.

Scientists say the discovery is especially surprising because related species are usually much larger and are normally found in the icy waters around Antarctica.

In 2015, a group of scientists were conducting some research on a submarine called Nautilus.

They were diving to just under 6,000 feet deep in the water - that's over twice as deep as the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is high.

When they spotted it on the ocean floor, one scientist exclaimed, "he's tiny! It's blue!", and immediately scooped it up to be researched.

Janet Voight, who works at the Field Museum in Chicago, was contacted by researchers at the Charles Darwin Institute to help them identify it.

She could immediately see they had something unique on their hands: "I went through the photos and saw this one and it was like, wow, that is totally special," she told Time Magazine.

Her team at the Field Museum used special scans to take thousands of pictures of the octopus, which allowed them to create digital 3D images of its insides, which meant they could figure out which family of octopuses it belongs to.