Kraken Controversy – New Fossil Evidence Of Legendary Sea Monster

MessageToEagle.com – Among many sea monsters of Norse myths and legends, there is Kraken that frightened sailors and was powerful enough to overturn ships and drag them down into the deepest and coldest water realms.

In the mid-18th century, Erik Ludvigsen Pontoppidan (1698 – 1764), Bishop of Bergen, described this legendary creature in his “Natural History of Norway” (1752 – 1753).

Could a real monster give rise to a variety of legends and myths of Kraken or is it just a tale passed down verbally through generations?

Did a giant Kraken drag nine huge ichthyosaurs back to its lair in the Triassic era, where their fossil remains are found today? Professor Mark McMenamin, a paleontologist at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts asks.

Ichthyosaurs of the species Shonisaurus popularisaveraged 2 to 4 m (6.5-13.1 ft) were predatory marine reptiles that swam the world’s oceans while dinosaurs walked the land.

Apparently, these ichthyosaurs – the Triassic’s counterpart to today’s predatory giant squid-eating sperm whales – were helpless against an even larger and more cunning sea monster that preyed on them.

In 2011 researchers reported an usual discoveryf vertebrae of a marine lizard ichthyosaur preserved in a rock layer at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada.

When McMenamin took a look at the fossils, he was struck by their strangeness; they seemed to be intelligently manipulated.

They were namely, arranged in a strange pattern by what they claimed was a giant Kraken-style octopus playing with its food.

“It became very clear that something very odd was going on there,” said McMenamin. “It was a very odd configuration of bones.”

First of all, the different degrees of etching on the bones suggested that the creatures were not all killed and buried at the same time. It also looked like the bones had been purposefully rearranged.

McMenamin hypothesized that nine gigantic ichthyosaur fossils were captured and transported by a gigantic cephalopod (“a Triassic kraken”) to its lair and later arranged into almost geometric patterns, some of which resemble the sucker arrays on cephalopod tentacles.

According to Professor McMenamin, the way the bones were arranged could not have occurred naturally and appears to have been the result of an attack by a much larger predator, a Kraken-type squid up to 30 metres long, for example.

See also:

Scientific Look At The Legendary Kraken – Largest Monster Of The Sea

Marine Creatures You’d Better Stay Away From

Legendary Sea Monster Exists: Icelandic Government Commission Says

Now, researchers have more evidence backing up their paleontological conundrum. Not only have they discovered a second example of strangely arranged bones, but also a fossil that appears to be the beak of an ancient squid or octopus.

Octopuses are mostly soft-bodied and don’t fossilize well except for their beaks, or mouth parts.

“This was extremely good luck,” said McMenamin, who recently presented his findings at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA).
“This was finding the needle in the haystack, really.”

“The Triassic Kraken hypothesis has survived all tests to date, including the current displacement probability test performed here, and is thus the leading explanation for the otherwise unexplained arrangement of ichthyosaur bones at Berlin Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada,” Professor McMenamin wrote in his paper.

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