No, it's not a Wise Tomet or any other fantastic fictional creation.
This is an animal most pre-schoolers are familiar with, although I think most people never learn how amazing it is.
Pliny the Elder wrote about it in 77 AD, the first known instance of the legend about this animal climbing trees. These animals have been known to be impressive sports oracles, and expert escape artists, and have their own magazine.
They are octopuses (not octopi, apparently) and there are all sorts of cool tricks they can do. But the reason that I'm thinking about them today is that I just saw this article about a philosophy professor at Harvard who seems to think that each tentacle might have independent thoughts. About two-thirds of an octopus's neurons are in its arms, so it sort of makes sense. Defining and testing intelligence is always really tricky, even in humans. No one seems to have come up with a reliable way to evaluate it yet in animals that think so differently from the way we do. Designing meaningful experiments can be really hard, especially when your test subject could easily be mistaken for either a space alien, rock, or modern art.
