It was a calm morning in Antarctica’s remote Ross Sea, during the season when the sun never sets, when Capt. John Bennett and his crew hauled up a creature with tentacles like fire hoses and eyes like dinner plates from a mile below the surface.
A colossal squid, 350 kilograms (770 pounds), as long as a minibus and one of the sea’s most elusive species, had been frozen for eight months until Tuesday.
The squid is a female, and its eight arms are each well over a meter (3.3 feet) long. Its two tentacles would have been perhaps double that length if they had not been damaged.
“This is essentially an intact specimen, which is almost an unparalleled opportunity for us to examine,” said Dr. Kat Bolstad, a squid scientist from the Auckland University of Technology led the team examining the creature.
Colossal squid sometimes inhabit the world of fiction and imagination, but have rarely been seen in daylight. It’s possible that ancient sightings of the species gave rise to tales of the kraken, or giant sea-monster squid, said Dr. Bolstad.
About 142,000 people from 180 countries watched streaming footage of the squid examination on the Internet.
