Scientists Just Found a Prehistoric Ocean Predator That Shouldn't Exist
Spinosnack
180,016 views
New Evidence Just Rewrote the Prehistoric Ocean's Food Chain
No arms. No body. No eyes. Just the mouths. Somehow that was enough for scientists to rebuild what they're calling the biggest octopus that ever lived — a soft, boneless animal from the Cretaceous ocean that may have stretched anywhere from six to nineteen metres, the length of a full bowling lane. Or it may have been the size of a bathtub. That's not a typo. That's the actual fight.
In 2008 the first team to study these beaks called the animal a foot long — something you could lift with one hand. Eighteen years later, a different team looked at the exact same fossils and said sixty feet. Nobody dug up a new bone in between. They just changed their minds about the shape of a body no human has ever seen.
This video digs into how you weigh a ghost: the machine that grinds priceless fossils to powder to find what's hidden inside, the riverbank on Vancouver Island where three hobbyists gave the first specimen away for free, the beaks worn down harder on the right side than the left, and the cephalopod scientists who went public within a week to say the giant Cretaceous octopus might not be real at all. Its closest living relatives are the googly-eyed dumbo octopuses that drift around eating plankton and glow in the dark. So how do you get from that to an apex predator crushing the bones of sea reptiles?
The beak is the only thing we'll ever have. Everything else is a guess balanced on one small, hard object in a drawer. Let's get into it.
For Sponsors and Biz: Drew@fjagency.net
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20 Comments
Something that old no longer exists after millions of years 😭 I know they needed to do it to learn more...but still....
Scientists Just Found a Prehistoric Ocean Predator That Shouldn't Exist
Spinosnack
180,016 views
New Evidence Just Rewrote the Prehistoric Ocean's Food Chain
No arms. No body. No eyes. Just the mouths. Somehow that was enough for scientists to rebuild what they're calling the biggest octopus that ever lived — a soft, boneless animal from the Cretaceous ocean that may have stretched anywhere from six to nineteen metres, the length of a full bowling lane. Or it may have been the size of a bathtub. That's not a typo. That's the actual fight.
In 2008 the first team to study these beaks called the animal a foot long — something you could lift with one hand. Eighteen years later, a different team looked at the exact same fossils and said sixty feet. Nobody dug up a new bone in between. They just changed their minds about the shape of a body no human has ever seen.
This video digs into how you weigh a ghost: the machine that grinds priceless fossils to powder to find what's hidden inside, the riverbank on Vancouver Island where three hobbyists gave the first specimen away for free, the beaks worn down harder on the right side than the left, and the cephalopod scientists who went public within a week to say the giant Cretaceous octopus might not be real at all. Its closest living relatives are the googly-eyed dumbo octopuses that drift around eating plankton and glow in the dark. So how do you get from that to an apex predator crushing the bones of sea reptiles?
The beak is the only thing we'll ever have. Everything else is a guess balanced on one small, hard object in a drawer. Let's get into it.
For Sponsors and Biz: Drew@fjagency.net
#Paleontology #Octopus #PrehistoricOcean #Cretaceous #Fossils #MarineBiology #ExtinctAnimals #DeepSea #SeaMonsters #Cephalopod #Dinosaurs #NaturalHistory #Science #GiantOctopus #prehistoric
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