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width =65% The California two-spot octopus displaying its blue eyespot. (Judit Pungor/UC Berkeley) Squishy cephalopods never cease to amaze with their clever features, including brained arms, color-shifting camouflage, escape artistry, and puzzle-solving skills. New analyses of squid, octopus, and cuttlefish (coleoid) genetics reveal their genomes are just as deliciously weird as the animals themselves. The cephalopod genome "is incredibly churned up," says developmental biologist Caroline Albertin, who led one of two new studies identifying strange twists in these cephalopods' genetic histories. In a massive effort, Albertin and colleagues sequenced three soft-bodied cephalopod genomes: the California two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides) –...

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...

In order that we might all raise the level of discourse and expand our language abilities, here is the daily post of "Word for the Day". calamari • \kah-luh-MAHR-ee\ • noun squid used as food Example sentence: Ophelia tried fried calamari for the first time from a small seafood shack near the beach. Did you know? The word "calamari" was borrowed into English from 17th-century Italian, where it functioned as the plural of "calamaro" or "calamaio." The Italian word, in turn, comes from the Medieval Latin noun "calamarium," meaning "ink pot" or "pen case," and can be ultimately traced...