I probably shouldn’t say this, but I love it when scientists occasionally throw all caution to the wind and clamber out on what seems a visibly shaky limb. Not of course, when they are offering up some new off-the-wall theory on autism or sudden infant death syndrome or flu vaccines—fields in which a little speculation could do a lot of harm. But in areas such as archaeology and palaeontology, a little derring-do on the far end of a branch can occasionally be a blessed relief—a reprieve, however short-lived, from a small mountain of papers that go on at numbing length on lithic use wear, say, or collared rim sherds, and neglect to inform the reader why these matter.
All this came to mind recently when I came across research that an American palaeontologist presented this month at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. To make a long story short, Mark McMenamin, a palaeontologist at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, thinks he’s found fossil evidence for a kraken—a massive, predatory, tentacled beast from the deep that took down carnivorous ichthyosaurs the size of school buses during the Triassic Period.
The kraken was a creature of Norse mythology, a monster said to wrap entire Viking longships and knarrs in its loving embrace and drag them down to its ocean-bottom lair for a leisurely munch. McMenamin believes that he has found the lair of a real kraken—and not, I hasten to add, a mere garden-variety giant squid—in what is known as the Luning Formation at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada. Continue reading
