As I have yet to see this being talked about on my dash as much as it should, I'll use this opportunity to write a post myself for once. Of course, I'm talking about the Big Fucking Octopus paper that was released yesterday.
To put it simply, Ikegami et al. studied the fossilized remains of the lower beak of several octopus specimen, in the orders Vampyromorpha, Cirrata, and Incirrata. What's crazy about the studied specimen is that the beak size is positively enormous, with one described species having a bigger beak than the Giant Squid (A. dux), the largest (by length) living invertebrate today at a maximum recorded total length of nearly 10 meters. Extrapolating the beak size to the total body length, the researchers calculated a size of ~2.8 to 7.7m for the smaller species, and a whopping ~6.6 to 18.6m for the larger one!
The team of researchers also studied the wear patterns on the beaks, and found wear patterns consistent with crushing bone and other hard materials. This suggests these large cephalopods would often prey on vertebrates, such as plesiosaurs and mosasaurs.
Naturally, these spectacular sizes have immediately sparked strong responses in cephalopod research circles, both positive and more cricital - as it is supposed to be. This includes criticism on the size calculations, and I'm eager to see any rebuttal papers coming up soon.
Either way, even following the more conservative estimates this species was huge. I know what will be living in my head rent-free the coming days. If you want to read more, the paper is open-access (yay!) and can be found below. If you have made or seen any paleo art based on this publication, please tag me! I'd love to see it. I promise I'll check my notes next month.
Shin Ikegami et al., Earliest octopuses were giant top predators in Cretaceous oceans. Science 392, 406-410 (2026). DOI: 10.1126/science.aea6285
Paleoart by Yohei Utsuki, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Hokkaido University.
