Researchers, who first hinted at a giant kraken roaming the seas in 2011, are now backing their claims with new fossil evidence. The researchers have claimed to have found a fossil that looks like an ancient squid or octopus’ beak.
Mark McMenamin, a paleontologist at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, ahs presented the evidence which is an odd arrangement of vertebrae of the ichthyosaur Shonisaurus popularis that was discovered in Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada. Shonisaurus popularis was a school-bus-size, flippered marine reptile which lived in the Triassic period, 250 - 200 million years ago.
McMenamin and his team said that the bones had been arranged there by a giant cephalopod (an octopus or squid) that was playing with its food. Now, McMenamin said that the possibility of natural processes like currents or mud compaction is “virtually zero” for them being able to re-arrange the bones, LiveScience reported.
To back his claim he talked about another example: an ichthyosaur fossil that was earlier on display at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Museum of Natural History. The fossil was laid out in the museum exactly as the one that was found in the field. Adjacent to the ichthyosaur was a “debris pile” of scattered bones that were no longer in their proper place in the skeleton.
And off to the side was a double row of vertebrae that was in the same configuration as McMenamin and his team had seen in the original ichthyosaur remains.
