Posted on 10/10/2011 6:55:25 AM PDT by decimon
Boulder, CO, USA - Long before whales, the oceans of Earth were roamed by a very different kind of air-breathing leviathan. Snaggle-toothed ichthyosaurs larger than school buses swam at the top of the Triassic Period ocean food chain, or so it seemed before Mount Holyoke College paleontologist Mark McMenamin took a look at some of their remains in Nevada. Now he thinks there was an even larger and more cunning sea monster that preyed on ichthyosaurs: a kraken of such mythological proportions it would have sent Captain Nemo running for dry land. McMenamin will be presenting the results of his work on Monday, 10 October at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Minneapolis.
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“It became very clear that something very odd was going on there,” said McMenamin. “It was a very odd configuration of bones.”
First of all, the different degrees of etching on the bones suggested that the shonisaurs were not all killed and buried at the same time. It also looked like the bones had been purposefully rearranged. That it got him thinking about a particular modern predator that is known for just this sort of intelligent manipulation of bones.
“Modern octopus will do this,” McMenamin said. What if there was an ancient, very large sort of octopus, like the kraken of mythology. “I think that these things were captured by the kraken and taken to the midden and the cephalopod would take them apart.”
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(Excerpt) Read more at geosociety.org ...
Fathom this ping.
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" - "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
Yoose guys is kraken me up!
Do a search for “shark vs octopus,” as mentioned in the article.
It’s pretty impressive to watch these boneless creatures take down a monster of the deeps!
Is that from Robert E. Howard?
Shouldn’t we put “evil lair” into “quotation marks”?
H.P. Lovecraft (friend of Robert E. Howard)
Nope. H. P. Lovecraft
Aw, come on! 10 posts and nobody’s yelled “Release the Kraken?!”
Sharks are cartilaginous fishes—which ‘boneless’ creature did you mean?
Someone said there are hundreds of large octopus on the floor of Puget Sound.
That Debbie Gibson is still a hottie. But man that is a bad movie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axPItX6liRM
Oh, you probably meant this vid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA8zQw6gDNI
Octopi are cephalopods, which are boneless aside from their beaks.
The article discusses this as well. I wasn’t referring to the shark, in this case.
H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Revive those old sea tales.
LOL! Didn’t Debbie pose in Playboy back in the early 2000 timeframe? I think I was in college at the time, and I remember my dorm mates scrambling to my room to see her in all of her naked glory.
Ah.
Thanks....(and thanks for noting that he was Howard’s friend...I don’t feel stupid for getting that wrong!)
Shot of my favorite scene from "Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus"
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