Tusoteuthis and the Cretaceous Giant Squids
Painting by Dan Varner
Architeuthis and Mesonychoteuthis, the giant and colossal squid, are enigmatic and awe inspiring animals. Very little is known about the lifestyle of these spectacular animals, despite the examination of numerous corpses of Architeuthis, much of what we know about the animals’ behaviour and lifestyle boils down to educated speculation. What is not so well known is that these modern squid were not the first giant squid in the Earths oceans, we have tantalising remains of animals that were at least as large as these modern species that shared the oceans with the ammonites, mosasaurs, giant turtles and plesiosaurs about 80 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period.
Breifly, as summarized by another person,
Architeuthis seems to be not at all related to the other forms of large squid known from Cretaceous fossils. The diagram showing
phylogeny and stratigraphy suggests that there is a whack of ghost lineage with this animal (but what else would we expect from this thing?).
