The kraken that demolished a sailing ship in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest was bigger, but the one in the news today is a pretty tall tale too. Krakens don’t all you forever-adolescent monster fans know, is a mythological beast, more squid than octopus but it’s a myth so it’s your pick. It was huge. Old woodcuts show ships foundering in their arms. Then along came a paleontologist from Mount Holyoke College to tell a meeting of the Geological Society of America that by a long tentacle of inference he thinks a 100-foot long beast of krakenish appearance once broke ichthyosaurs’ necks and ate them, back in the Triassic. The evidence lies in Davey Jones’s locker – lined up vertebral disks, in regular patterns and rearranged from their natural sequence in a living creature. Today’s they are in Nevada, stranded by geological uplift of a vanished sea. They are strange – who’s to say they cannot be a deliberate mimicking of the suckers on its arms by a colossal cephalopod at the entry to its abyssal lair? A self-portrait, if you will. Octopi are darned smart for a spineless creature, squid maybe too, and a big one might have done this.
Hmppphhhhtt. Sure. It’s possible. But possible means maybe and maybe usually means probably not in my book just because the cosmos has more maybes than realities. One does not pass up a story like this easily. But, one ought to call around just to be sure there aren’t other experts giggling at the notion. A few did. The story, if one has to write it, ought to be the persistently deep mystery of this one fossil bed, as illustrated by the lengths to which some (one) expert went to make sense of them. This is a stab in the dark.
Still, hard not to get on board with the imagery this fabulation inspires.
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