(ORDO NEWS) — Another example of the famous “mythical monsters” that turned out to be real is the terrifying giant squid. Reports of the giant squid date back to the time of Aristotle 2,000 years ago.
Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist, did a good job describing the giant squid in his Natural History.
Pliny described the size of the squid as 9 meters in length, and even in our time there are cases of observing giant squids over 12 meters in length!
Early encounters with giant squid were likely the inspiration for several mythological sea monsters, such as the Kraken from Norse mythology and Scylla from Greek mythology.
The giant squid remained a “myth” for so long because its existence seemed fantastic and difficult to verify. The sea is almost incomprehensible in its size and depth.
Looking for anything in the ocean, even a giant squid, is like looking for a needle in a haystack. This is exacerbated by the fact that the giant squid is a deep sea creature.
The only chance the early zoologists had to study the giant squid was through the carcasses, which very rarely washed ashore.
The problem was that hungry sea creatures would often start eating the carcasses before they washed ashore, meaning that complete specimens were rare.
To this was added the fact that the carcasses, as a rule, rotted very quickly.
The first recorded discovery of a nearly intact giant squid carcass was in the 1870s.
However, it was only in the last decade or so that we were able to photograph a live specimen, cementing the giant squid’s status as a former cryptid.
Pictured above: A life-size model of a record-breaking giant squid discovered near Glover Harbour, Newfoundland
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