Would You be Scared of this Giant Octopus?

Generally octopuses don't fossilise - they are essentially bags of water. But their beaks are preserved and someone has found some big ones in Cretaceous rocks. And using present day beak sizes and octopus sizes has come to the conclusion that their beaks belonged to an octopus 7 to 19 metres in length!

Cretaceous marine predators (at maximum estimated size) with a scuba diver for scale. Credit: After Ikegami et al. Fig. 4, and Jacobs 2026.

Was the octopus a top predator or was it an extra large food source for a Mosasaurus? It is certainly a very good focus for speculation. Proving anything might be a difficult task.

You can read all about it HERE, based on THIS PAPER

 Some New (but Old) Cambrian Fossils

A correspondent sent me THIS LINK (but I had spotted it my self!). It concerns a recently discovered Lagerstätte in Southern China, called the Huayuan biota.

It has an added importance as being just after the first mass extinction of the Phanerozoic. It contains some old favourites from the Burgess Shale but many new species have been identified.

The find is of importance for many reasons but for me it is important for the wonderful photographs of the beasties. The source academic paper is HERE

non-bilaterian metazoans and deuterostomes from the Huayuan biota