![]() 2 This may be so, but a great deal remains unknown about the giant squid. Given that only dead giant squids are found at the surface, he says it’s unlikely live specimens would venture beyond their natural habitat in the ocean depths. Photo Gary Bell, Squids range in size from the small common variety shown here, up to giants many metres long.ĭespite the giant squid’s formidable physical characteristics, Roper doubts that these creatures would have attacked boats, like the ‘monsters’ of literary legend. Sailors and fishermen tell of catching whales covered in welts that were very probably made by these suckers. The giant squid is equipped with two grasping arms and eight tentacles, each containing several suckers with edges featuring jagged ‘teeth’ to help it grip prey. 2 He believes the most likely place to find a giant squid is the Kaikoura Canyon, off New Zealand’s South Island, a favoured feeding ground for sperm whales. He has already dedicated four years of his life to searching for this, the ‘largest invertebrate ever to have lived on Earth’, and is not yet ready to give up, despite being unsuccessful thus far. The race is now on among scientists to find a live giant squid in the mysterious, dark, and relatively uncharted world of the deep sea. Since sperm whales feed at depths of up to 2,000 metres (6,600 feet), they would have no difficulty including giant squids in their diet. ![]() This would explain why such a huge creature, with long tentacles covered in sharp suckers, and eyes the size of soccer balls, is able to remain hidden in this age of advanced technology. 1 It is reasonable to assume that the giant squid, purported to be up to 18 metres (60 feet) in length and weighing up to 900 kg (nearly a tonne), lives near the deep ocean floor. We know this because dead giant squids have washed up on beaches, been caught by fishermen or found in the stomachs of sperm whales. See the article Giants of the Deep, including the ‘update’ box. Update: Since this photo was taken, other giant squid have been captured. Squid researcher Clive Roper finds these giants of the sea, like the specimen in the background, worth much further investigation. Despite the fact that no modern scientist has seen a live giant squid, there is absolutely no doubt that they still live-many hundreds, maybe even thousands, of metres below the surface of the sea. It’s now known that not only did such tentacled giants exist in the days when the above authors lived, they continue to exist today. Lord Alfred Tennyson tells of a marine monster with ‘giant arms’ in his 19 th century poem The Kraken,and the naturalist in Jules Verne’s classic tale 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1873), expresses disgust at the sight of an ‘immense cuttlefish’ swimming near the ship. Herman Melville, in his famous 1851 novel, Moby Dick, describes a duel to the death between a sperm whale and a giant squid. The tales about the mysterious giant squid have a lesson to offer, namely that a persistently recurring story, despite being opposed to ‘common experience’, turns out to have a factual basis. It has therefore always been convenient for such long-agers to dismiss all such accounts as purely fanciful. They would insist that such creatures died out millions of years before the first person appeared, a position favoured even by many who would claim to be opposed to evolution.įor centuries, stories have abounded about squids of monstrous proportions. ![]() It is also easy to see the widespread stories of dragons and huge sea serpents as having a basis in fact, in the light of reconstructions of certain dinosaurs and marine monsters such as the Kronosaurus, now found only as fossils.īut such connections make little sense to someone viewing the evidence through the ‘interpretive lenses’ of our present culture. For instance, the hundreds of stories of a global Flood, with amazing parallels to the original in Genesis, give strong support to the truth of the Bible’s real history of the universe. ![]() Tales abound around the world of the existence of awesome creatures and events. The mysterious giant squidīy Paula Weston and Carl Wieland ![]() Sharing purposes, readers are advised to supplement these historic articles with more up-to-date ones suggested in the Related Articles and Further Reading below. Editor’s note: As Creation magazine has been continuously published since 1978, weĪre publishing some of the articles from the archives for historical interest, such as this. ![]()
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