Maegan - 13 November 2005 12:47 PM

...Sorry, but for every 1 person in 1870 that believed a giant squid/octopus exited…there were millions of people that didn’t believe.  It’s NOW (and by that I don’t mean 1870) that people have the hard evidence…and there are more believers than non-believers.

It’s not a numbers game. To quote Wikipedia:-

A giant squid specimen washed ashore in Glover’s Harbour, Newfoundland on November 2, 1878. Its body was 6.1m (20 ft) long, and one of its tentacles measured 10.7m (35 ft) long and it was estimated as weighing 2.2 tonnes.

The period (1870 - 1880) in Newfoundland saw the greatest known concentration of beached giant squid to date: 50 or more individual squid carcasses washed up on the shores of Newfoundland during this decade. An almost equal number of strandings also occurred in New Zealand during the late nineteenth century.

Carcasses are hard (well, soft and squishy) evidence. A. dux has been known to biologists for a long time; it’s an enigma, not an subject of controversy.

The population of Newfoundland in 1870 was 146,536.  There couldn’t have been that much of an impact since people were still sceptical until recently.

Maegan - 15 November 2005 01:27 PM

The population of Newfoundland in 1870 was 146,536.  There couldn’t have been that much of an impact since people were still sceptical until recently.

Huge cephalopods, probably octopuses, were recorded in the Greek writings of
Homer, Aristotle and Pliny and large squid, or kraken, were the legendary sea monsters of
the Middle Ages. But the myths and fantasies far exceeded the facts about these seldom
seen creatures. The second half of the 19th Century saw a significant advance in the
knowledge about Architeuthis, primarily because specimens began to find their way into
the hands of zoologists. While Steenstrup published several papers on “colossal” squids,
first using the name Architeuthis in 1857, it was the American zoologist, A.E. Verrill who,
between 1874 and 1882, described several species of Architeuthis based on a considerable
number of whole specimens or parts of specimens. In the late 19th and early 20th
centuries the scientific literature on Architeuthis swelled with descriptions of new species,
often based only on pieces of specimens (e.g., tentacles, beaks or arms).

From “Records of Architeuthis Specimens from Published Reports” - Michael J. Sweeney, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.

To quote Wikipedia

Do you have another source? Since I discovered that Wikipedia has a page saying astrology is a science, and true, I’ve abandoned it.
And that Wikipedia has to say Brethanarians might exist.

I would personally like to read up more on this “sea giant”. It’s very interesting to me, according to the area it is in it could be in an area where the water isn’t horribly deep, the sulu sea isn’t techinically close to as deap as the ocean so it’s possible it could be in a shallow region next to a random island or something.

I do agree that it strangly resembles another one of the colossi in the game Shadow of the Colossus but lets hold that aside for futher investigations for now…. It does seem odd that it’s just now discovered but lets think about this, we are all human beings and we all have a stubborn side and a careless side, not everyone notices things as well as others, some dont care, and others are scared to tell things so theres a number of reasons it might not have been reported in the past if say it is really there….

I for one am going to look into it and see what i can dig up on it because I find it quite astonishing. If anyone else knows anything about it or finds anything about it would you be nice and tell

Closed