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Fossil records reveal two giant species of octopus at the top of the food chain 100 million years ago. | Credit: Illustration by Julia Wytrazek \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n
The giant kraken, a mythical marine beast, may not be entirely fiction. New evidence suggests that octopuses up to 62 feet long likely roamed the waters of ancient Earth, ripping and devouring prey in their path.<\/p>\n
Monster under the sea<\/p>\n
These gigantic octopuses might have been formidable predators of the ocean<\/a> approximately 100 million years ago, according to a study published in the journal Science<\/a>. \u201cWith their large bodies, long arms, powerful jaws and advanced behavior, they represent what could be described as a real Cretaceous Kraken,\u201d said Yasuhiro Iba, a paleontologist at Hokkaido University in Japan and the lead author of the study, to Reuters<\/a>. The invertebrates would have “rivaled\u201d and \u201cpossibly even preyed upon apex predators such as mosasaurs and plesiosaurs,\u201d said The Guardian<\/a>.<\/p>\n Though octopuses are some of Earth\u2019s oldest animals, they are difficult to study from the past, because they lack hard external shells and have very few fossils. So researchers studied the fossilized beaks of the animals, revealing two extinct species: Nanaimoteuthis jeletzkyi and Nanaimoteuthis haggarti. The beaks and jaws were used to deduce the size of the creatures, between 23 and 62 feet, as well as their feeding habits.<\/p>\n The jaws showed “signs of intensive wear, with patterns indicating that these animals were dismantling hard-shelled prey,\u201d said Live Science<\/a> (a sister site of The Week). \u201cTo see a beak this size is quite amazing, to be honest. It was a massive animal,\u201d said Thomas Clements, a paleobiologist at the University of Reading, to The Guardian. \u201cI certainly wouldn\u2019t have wanted to go swimming in the ancient oceans if these things were swimming around.\u201d<\/p>\n Large and in charge<\/p>\n The octopuses of today are notoriously intelligent<\/a>, and that was likely the case in the past, as well. The researchers found that the octopuses\u2019 jaws were \u201cground down on one side by as much as 10% of their total size, based on reconstructions,\u201d said Live Science. This \u201clopsided loss suggests lateralized behavior, which is linked to being brainier.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSome of those remarkable traits\u201d that are also present in the modern-day creatures \u201cmay already have been emerging in early octopuses during the Cretaceous,\u201d said Iba to NPR<\/a>. Along with intelligence, ancient octopuses probably also used their strong tentacles to rip prey apart before eating it, similar to modern octopuses\u2019 hunting patterns.<\/p>\n \u201cFor roughly the past 370 million years, marine \u200becosystems have been thought to be dominated by large vertebrate predators \u2014 first fishes and sharks, then marine reptiles and later whales,\u201d said Iba. \u201cGiant invertebrates, namely octopuses, also functioned as apex predators in the Cretaceous sea,\u201d according to the research.<\/p>\n However, there may be some inaccuracies in the findings because the researchers used \u201cerror-prone\u201d methods in estimating the size of the octopuses and produced the largest possible size range for them, said Ren\u00e9 Hoffmann, a paleontologist focusing on fossil cephalopods at the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, to Live Science. Their size also doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that the octopuses were apex predators.<\/p>\n Despite this, the results provide valuable new information about the ancient animals<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s a big old planet,\u201d said Neil Landman, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, to The Associated Press<\/a>. \u201cSo we have lots to look at to piece together the marine ecosystem through time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. 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