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The thing was the size of a pickup truck. It reeked of decomposing mammal, and it was covered in what appeared to be long, white hair. “We’ve seen whales wash up before, and some that had been stuck on the shore for a few weeks, and never have they grown hair like that,” she said. Lynn touched it and said it was “firm but squishy” and felt blubbery. She could tell it was the body of something; she just didn’t know what. Tegner was confused by the long tendrils that appeared to be attached to it. He could see them...

TACOMA, Wash. - When Jamie Bisceglia met up with some fishermen who had hooked an octopus during a fishing derby in the Tacoma Narrows August 2, she saw an opportunity for an unusual picture. "It was a photo contest in the derby. So, crazy me, hindsight now and looking back, I probably made a big mistake," Bisceglia said. Bisceglia put the octopus on her face and posed. At first, it grabbed with her with its suckers, and then did something she didn't expect. It bit her on the face. "It had barreled its beak into my chin and then let...

After some haggling over which jurisdiction was responsible for two dead whales washed up in Pacifica, crews on Tuesday began ripping up mammal flesh and burying the weighty beasts after neighbors complained of their rotting stench. An excavator dug into the whale flesh, tearing skin and muscle, before getting ready to sink the pieces of blubber and bone deep into the sand. Pacifica's Interim Chief of Police Dan Steidle said that after more than a month of discussion, it's been determined that the area where the whales washed up on April 14 and May 5 belong to the San Francisco...

A reconstruction of Nectocaris pteryx Copyright 2009 Marianne Collins A recent study sheds new light on a previously unclassifiable 500 million-year-old squid-like carnivore known as Nectocaris pteryx. “We think that this extremely rare creature is an early ancestor of squids, octopuses and other cephalopods,” says Martin Smith of University of Toronto (U of T) ’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) and the Department of Natural History at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). “This is significant because it means that primitive cephalopods were around much earlier than we thought, and offers a reinterpretation of the long-held origins of...

Palaeontologists have drawn with ink extracted from a preserved fossilised squid uncovered during a dig in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. The fossil, thought to be 150 million years old, was found when a rock was cracked open, revealing the one-inch-long black ink sac. A picture of the creature and its Latin name was drawn using its ink...