{"id":54658,"date":"2026-07-07T18:45:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T18:45:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/54658\/"},"modified":"2026-07-07T18:45:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T18:45:14","slug":"the-first-octopuses-were-kraken-like-monsters-in-the-cretaceous-waters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/54658\/","title":{"rendered":"The First Octopuses Were Kraken-like Monsters In the Cretaceous Waters"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Artist<\/a>\u2018I certainly wouldn\u2019t have wanted to go swimming in the ancient oceans if these things were swimming around,\u2019 one scientist said. Illustration: Hokkaido University.<\/p>\n

For centuries, humans have told stories about the legendary Kraken, a huge octopus that coud sink ships whole. But roughly 100 million years ago, a sort of Kraken may have actually existed. Researchers found fossils suggesting that these early octopuses could have reached 19 meters in legnth.<\/p>\n

Their fossil jaws<\/a> show extensive chips, scratches and asymmetric wear, which are signs of crushing, powerful bites. It may also suggest lateralized behavior linked to advanced cognition. In other words: some of the earliest known octopuses were huge and intelligent, possibly dominating their ecosystem.<\/p>\n

The Monsters Were Real<\/p>\n

For the past 370 million years ago, vertebrates have dominated most ecosystems. The vertebrates (defined by having a backbone) include mammals, birds, amphibians, and various classes of fish and reptiles. They\u2019re usually the predators. Meanwhile, the invertebrates are usually the prey or, at most, mid-level hunters.<\/p>\n

But these octopuses disagreed.<\/p>\n

Two recently described species suggest that even in the age of the dinosaurs, octopuses were heavy hitters. Nanaimoteuthis haggarti may have stretched up to 18.6 meters (\u2248 61 ft) from mantle to arm tips, roughly as big as the great marine reptiles<\/a> of its day. Another, N. jeletzkyi, may have reached up to 7.7 meters (\u2248 25.2 ft).<\/p>\n

\u201cOur study shows that these were not simply large versions of modern octopuses,\u201d said Dr Yasuhiro Iba, a palaeontologist at Hokkaido University and lead author of the research, for The Guardian<\/a>. \u201cThey were giant predators at the very top of the Cretaceous marine food web<\/a>. This changes the view that Cretaceous seas were dominated only by large vertebrate predators.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team studied 27 fossil octobrachian jaws, including 12 newly discovered finned-octopus jaws found through a digital fossil-mining method using high-resolution grinding tomography and an AI model. So, there\u2019s quite a lot of uncertainty and extrapolation in the study.<\/p>\n

But the most impressive thing was the wear and tear.<\/p>\n

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A Jaw With a Story to Tell<\/p>\n

\"AI<\/a>AI-generated depiction of what the octopus may have looked like, surrounded by other Cretaceous marine creatures like mosasaurs and ammonites.<\/p>\n

The octopus jaws show chips, scratches, polish, and asymmetric loss along the jaw edges.<\/p>\n

Modern cephalopods that crush hard prey (shells, crustaceans, bones) show similar jaw damage. In these fossils, the damage was extreme. The researchers estimate that both giant species lost about 10% of total jaw length from accumulated wear. The scratches reached up to 5 millimeters, and many chips exceeded 1 millimeter.<\/p>\n

This was not a delicate eater.<\/p>\n

The authors argue these octopuses used their entire jaws dynamically to dismantle prey. Their jaws were meant for grinding against hard skeletons. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s another clue that researchers highlight. The asymmetrical wear and tear might be linked to intelligence.<\/p>\n

Signs of Intelligence<\/p>\n

In both giant species, the right jaw edge was more worn than the left. The authors interpret this as possible evidence of lateralized behavior, the animal favoring one side during feeding, sort of like handedness in a broad sense.<\/p>\n

That is a bold inference, and it should be treated carefully. Wear patterns do not fossilize thoughts. But the paper links this asymmetry to behavior seen in modern octopuses, whose intelligence is often compared with vertebrates. But if this assumption holds true, the implication is tantalizing: advanced octopus cognition may have deep Cretaceous roots.<\/p>\n

Octopuses are often called the closest thing Earth has to an alien intelligence: soft-bodied, short-lived animals with nervous systems built nothing like ours, yet capable of problem-solving, exploration, camouflage, tool-like behavior, and striking behavioral flexibility. Their intelligence likely evolved under pressure from a dangerous ocean world<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Combined with their enormous size, powerful bite, long arms, and evidence of hard-prey crushing, these ancient finned octopuses may have been large, flexible, intelligent hunters, using both muscle and behavior to compete with the marine reptiles of the Cretaceous.<\/p>\n

The study was published<\/a> in Science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018I certainly wouldn\u2019t have wanted to go swimming in the ancient oceans if these things were swimming around,\u2019…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54659,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[10707,10709,153,8,10004],"class_list":["post-54658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-hokkaido","tag-cretaceous","tag-fossil","tag-hokkaido","tag-japan","tag-octopus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}