Overview
- University of Hokkaido researchers reported in Science on Thursday that fossil beaks from Japan and Canada show some eight‑armed cephalopods reached close to 19 meters in total length.
- Using high‑resolution tomography that grinds rock layer by layer and an AI model to flag fossils, the team recovered 12 new jaws and reanalyzed others for a 27‑specimen dataset archived as 3D models.
- Nanaimoteuthis haggarti had jaw elements up to 4.43 meters, yielding body estimates of about 18.6 to 19 meters, while N. jeletzkyi had jaws up to 1.84 meters from rocks dated 100 to 72 million years old on Pacific shelves.
- Heavy wear on the beak tips—up to about 10 percent lost—plus scratches and rounded edges point to repeated crushing of hard‑shelled and bony prey, and uneven wear hints at side preference in feeding.
- The authors argue these octopus relatives could act as apex predators, though they report no direct evidence of attacks on mosasaurs, and they say the finds extend octopus lineages in time and raise new questions about their extinction.