Kraken of the Cretaceous: 19-meter octopus reshapes deep-sea giants lore
Paleontologists revisited the size of the Late Cretaceous giant octopus Nanaimoteuthis haggarti and now estimate it could reach about 7–19 meters, potentially making it the largest non-colonial invertebrate and a distant relative of modern deep-sea octopuses; initially misclassified as a vampire squid, the species was re-identified from jaw fossils on Vancouver Island and in Japan, with its North Pacific 84-million-year-old habitat and deep-sea lifestyle raising questions about size estimates and octopus evolution.
