Tag: Giant Squid

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When monsters attack

Several weeks ago we had a story about legendary monster, Godzilla, receiving official citizenship from Japan. That’s odd, since he spent a lot of time destroying Tokyo. That’s what monsters do, though. They attack, and not only in the movies. Here are a few real-world encounters with monsters from the news.

Giant Raccoon

Photo from World News Daily Report shows the horrific damage to the Bakers’ SUV caused by what they describe as a giant raccoon.

This article by the Weekly World News Report describes a bizarre incident in which a Montana couple is attacked by what they described as a giant raccoon about eight feet tall. Arthur and Helen Baker say they were driving on the highway when the creature appeared in front of them. It attacked their vehicle, smashing the windows and flipping the vehicle several times. It continued to attack until it injured itself on the broken windows.

Raccoons can get large, but none have been recorded to get that large, leading authorities to suggest that this encounter may have been with a bear. Even if that was the case, something that will attack and beat up a vehicle to that extent and go after the people inside is the stuff of which nightmares are made!

Russian Chupacabra

Carnage left from the mysterious creature in Russia that is killing chickens. Image © www.moe-online.ru

According to this article at rt.com, a mysterious creature has been killing hundreds of chickens in the Russian village of Davydovka in a methodical and, perhaps, intelligent fashion. Very little blood is found at the scene, putting it in line with Chupacabra legends. This is not the first time that attacks like this have been seen in Russia. A couple of years ago similar attacks happened in the Voronezh Region in April and two years prior.

Tracks discovered at the scene are similar to a canine, but the methodology is very unlike what would be expected from a dog, wolf, or other similar predator.

Is it possible that this creature has somehow hitched a ride from Latin America to find new prey in Russia?

 Giant Squid Attacks Russian Vessel

What gods did the Russians anger? Not only are the chickens suffering, but here is footage of a fishing vessel attacked by a giant squid. This looks like something from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea! Can you imagine that just a few years the idea of a giant squid was considered myth and now we have this! Attracted by their catch the monster squid forced the crew to fight hard to drive it away.

https://youtu.be/fIKgNqlLU6c

Hopefully, most of us will never encounter a real-life monster. They will remain the stuff of nightmares and scary stories. These tales are a reminder, though, that any of us, at any time, may cross the threshold where the nightmare becomes real. Pleasant dreams!

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GIANT SQUID FILMED ALIVE FOR THE FIRST TIME

Discovery Channel will air the first-ever footage of a live giant squid.
Discovery Channel will air the first-ever footage of a live giant squid.

 

For the first time ever, we finally have video footage of a live giant squid in its natural habitat, deep in the ocean’s abyss. The footage, which will air on a future Discovery Channel special, was captured by a film crew approximately 3,000 feet down in the Northern Pacific Ocean.

According to Richard Ellis, author of The Search for the Giant Squid, “It’s an exciting, exciting discovery.”

“We can learn how this thing moves, how it swims, what it does with its arms when it swims… Because it’s the first time anybody has ever seen one alive, it is an enormous breakthrough for science — and for mythology, of all things — because for a long time people didn’t even think they existed.”

I think this is great news for the field of cryptozoology, since here is a perfect example of something that has been described in sightings and legends like that of the Kraken (a giant tentacled sea monster); for centuries people dismissed it as fantasy, but yet modern scientists, who took great steps to seek out the creature, actually succeeded in proving and documenting its existence.

Here’s the CNN interview with Richard Ellis, unfortunately they don’t show any of the actual footage of the giant squid, just a few stills (I guess we’ll have to wait for that Discovery Channel special):

 

SOURCE:  http://www.cnn.com/video/?hpt=hp_c2#/video/world/2013/01/08/exp-early-ellis-giant-squid.cnn

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GIANT SQUID CAPTURED ON VIDEO IN IT’S NATURAL HABITAT

Photo of the Curiosity submurisble before being launched to incredible depths. Image credit Discovery Channel
Photo of the Curiosity submurisble before being launched to incredible depths. Image credit Discovery Channel

This is great! For the first time ever, Discovery has sent a tiny submarine known as Curiosity to the deepest parts of the ocean and has captured the ever elusive GIANT SQUID in natural habitat! They’re holding on to the footage until January of next year and you can bet that’ll be one thing on tv I’ll be sure not to miss.

Laughing Squid writes:

For the first time ever, the elusive giant squid has been captured on video in its natural habitat. Discovery Channel will show the footage on January 27, 2013 in the season finale of Curiosity in the episode, Monster Squid: The Giant Is Real. NHK will air their special on the first-ever footage of the giant squid in early January 2013. According to Discovery Channel, Japanese channel NHK will air the footage in early January 2013.

“When Discovery does natural history it sets the bar high, and this ground breaking project features the very first-ever footage of a live giant squid in its natural habitat. Our crew came face-to-face with the giant squid, and it’s the ideal season finale for our Curiosity series that stirs the imagination of our audience, bravely asking questions and fearlessly seeking answers. This latest production, four years in the making, is a world-first achievement for television, and I’m excited to share it,” said Eileen O’Neill, Group President of Discovery and TLC Networks.”

Read more at laughingsquid.com/giant-squid-captured-on-video-for-first-time/

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GIANT SQUID FOUND IN FLORIDA

A 25-foot-long giant squid is splayed out on a tarp after it was picked up by a fishing crew over the weekend.

 

By Nidhi Subbaraman

Florida fishermen snared a real-life sea monster over the weekend: a giant squid measuring 25 feet in length.

“It’s really, really, really rare to get giant squids because they’re so huge, and live so deep,” John Slapcinsky, a collection manager at the Florida Museum of Natural History, told me. For museum workers and scientists who specialize in giant squids, this specimen is quite the catch.

University of Florida researcher Roger Portell injects preservative into the giant squid.

The animal was bobbing in the water when the fisherman chanced upon it on Sunday. They hauled it onto their boat, put it on ice, and brought it to shore. There, they alerted the Florida Fish and Wildlife conservation commission, who called in the Florida Museum of Natural History.

“I thought we definitely need to bring it in, because no one’s going to believe us if we don’t,” Robert Benz, one of the original squid finders, said in a press release. “I didn’t want to leave it out there and just let the sharks eat it.”

Somewhere along the way, the squid died.

It’s now been relocated to the Florida Museum of Natural History, where Slapcinsky and his colleagues are preserving the massive invertebrate. “Soft bodied squids spoil easily,” Slapcinsky told me.

The squid will be put through quite the regimen over the next month, and will be injected with and bathed in a cocktail of preservatives. These will kill the bacteria in the body of the squid and firm up the soft tissue of the animal, Slapcinsky explained.

A tentacle coils out from the dead squid's body. Studying the creature and sequencing its DNA should help scientists determine how various breeds of deep-sea squid are related.

Because they’re so rarely observed in the wild, or found dead (they get eaten pretty quickly), there’s a lot that scientists don’t know about the behavior of the enormous animals, like how they reproduce or what they eat. Also, a debate continues about whether giant squids make up a single species, or several, and Slapcisnky hopes that DNA analysis of this new squid will have some answers.

It’s not yet clear if the squid will make it into a museum exhibit, Slapcinsky says — the museum may not have the right equipment or the space to show off the spineless specimen. But it will be available for squid researchers to visit, to take a closer look.

 

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Source:  http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/29/6976926-fishermen-pick-up-dying-giant-squid