"I saw a tentacle through a
porthole. It was thicker than my leg and it was really
pulling the boat hard."
So were the words of veteran yachtsman Olivier de Kersauson, an
eyewitness of a unique attack that seems straight from Jules
Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. French sailors
taking part in the round-the-world Jules Verne Trophy say they
came across one of the most elusive monsters of the sea: the giant
squid.
Scientifically known as Architeutis dux, the animal is the
largest of all invertebrates, reaching lengths of 60 feet (18
meters). The largest squid to be measured
was studied on November 2, 1878. The men who discovered the
stranded squid found that measured from the tip of the head to the
bottom of the beak it came to nearly 20 feet in length. The
longest of the arms was 35 feet long, making for a creature 55
feet in length.
According to Olivier de Kersauson, the sighting occurred off the
Portuguese island of Madeira. Several hours into his voyage
he found that a giant squid had clamped on to the hull of his
boat, with two of its tentacles blocking the rudder.
Unlike Jules Verne's fictional Captain Nemo, Kersauson did not
have to fight with the monster and cut off its tentacles.
According to his report, the squid released its grip when he
stopped the boat.
"We didn't have anything to scare off this beast, so I don't
know what we would have done if it hadn't let go. We weren't
going to attack it with our penknives," he said.
Kersauson says the squid must have been 22 to 26 feet (7 to 8
meters) long.
One exciting report reveals that giant squids can reach monstrous
proportions. A certain A.G. Starkey, on board a British
Admiralty trawler in WWII, observed one of these amazing
animals. He was alone on deck fishing when he noticed a
strange object in the water next to the boat.
"As I gazed, fascinated, a circle of green light glowed in
my area of illumination. This green unwinking orb I suddenly
realized was an eye. The surface of the water undulated with
some strange disturbance. Gradually I realized that I was
gazing at almost point-blank range at a huge squid."
Walking the length of the boat, Starkey realized the creature
stretched the whole length of the ship. The vessel was over
175 feet long, making for an extremely large squid.
In any case, think twice before you scoff at the famous Kraken of
lore.
Insect Upsets Theory Of Evolution
by Jonathan
Drake
S: The Telegraph
(1-16-03)
Scientists thought that, according to evolution, once an insect
lineage loses its wings, its descendants should remain flightless.
Like an airplane, there are many ways to wreck its flying ability,
but only a few ways to ever enable it to take to the skies
again. Such is not the case, however, after an example of
"re-evolution" was discovered.
Interestingly, their study shows that wings were lost in the
primitive ancestor of stick insects, then reacquired four times
during evolution. Prof Michael Whiting, Taylor Maxwell and
Sven Bradler at Brigham Young University, Utah, analyzed the DNA
of 35 species of stick insects, publishing their findings in Nature
as the first evidence of what scientists once thought impossible.
"This is the first example of a complex feature being lost
and recovered much later in an evolutionary lineage," said
Prof Whiting. "The big surprise is that these sticks
have maintained the integrity of the underlying genes for wing
expression over 50 to 100 million years while they were
wingless. This suggests that the genes for wing formation
must be closely linked to other features the organism needs to
survive, such as leg formation, and hence it was possible to turn
these genes back on later in stick evolution."
Whiting referred to Dollo's Law, which states that organs or
complex structures cannot return to the state seen in an ancestor.
The idea that perhaps the insects didn't evolve at all, of course,
wasn't mentioned.
"Cyclops" Remains Found On Crete
by Jonathan
Robison
S: CNN.com (1-30-03)
With the appearance of a one-eyed cyclops monster, researchers
on the southern Greek island of Crete have unearthed the
fossilized tusk, teeth, and bones of a Deinotherium Gigantisimum,
a fearsome elephant-like animal that moved around larger areas of
Europe than previously believed.
"It was more widespread than we thought," said
Charalampos Fassoulas, a geologist who headed the excavations by
the University of Crete's Natural History Museum. "We
don't have many fossils of this animal, so everything we find
increases our knowledge about it and its habitat."
The 4 1/2-foot (1.4-meter) tusk, which curved downward from its
chin, was found in September, along with seven fossilized teeth
the size of softballs and several bones on farmland cleared to
plant olive trees. The creature was the largest of its kind
and reached nearly 15 feet (4.5 meters) tall. Its remains have
been found primarily in central Europe.
Amazingly, like elephants today, it could probably swim, and that
for great distances. "Vegetarian animals could swim a
lot," Fassoulas said. "And we believe that these animals
came probably from Asia Minor via (the islands of) Rhodes and
Karpathos to reach Crete."
In the middle of the elephant's skull is a large hole which was
the nasal cavity for its trunk. This odd feature could have
given rise to the tales of the cyclops, the ferocious mythological
giant with one eye that appears in Homer's Odyssey and
other stories.
"People who lived in the early Greek period may have seen
(elephant) bones and couldn't have imagined where they could have
come from," said Fassoulas. "Unfortunately we
didn't find the skull which is very important. This would give us
a lot of information," he said.
Indeed, it's not hard to see how one could conjure up an image of
such a fanciful beast by the appearance of a Deinotherium
Gigantisimum skull.
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