Artist's impression of a giant Cretaceous cephalopod. YOHEI UTSUKI/HOKKAIDO UNIVERSITY
Jules Verne's imagination may not have been unbridled after all. The giant octopus attacking Captain Nemo Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869) had formidable ancestors in the Cretaceous oceans, between 100 and 72 million years ago. That is the suggestion made by a study published in Science on April 23. Yasuhiro Iba (Hokkaido University) and his colleagues analyzed fossilized cephalopod jaws found in sedimentary rocks in Japan and near Vancouver, in western Canada.
With their estimated body lengths ranging from seven to 19 meters, these creatures would have ranked among the top marine predators, the researchers wrote. They would have coexisted with nightmarish reptiles such as the mosasaur (17 meters long), plesiosaur (12 meters) and the sharks of the time (10 meters).
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