Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
The Kraken. A symbol of terror for sailors throughout history. Typically described as a huge squid-like creature, it was feared for its ability to drag ships to the bottom of the sea with its menacing tentacles. With the benefit of hindsight and modern zoology, we ascribe sightings of such beasts to giant squid, whose arms and tentacles would strike fear into the heart of any medieval sailor with a shred of self-preservation. But in 2011, Mark and Diana McMenamin proposed the existence of a prehistoric version of the beast that had haunted humanity’s nightmares for centuries: the Triassic Kraken.
Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada is home to a huge amount of Shonisaurus fossils. Shonisaurus was a carnivorous, toothed predator the size of a humpback whale with jaws up to three meters long. Their remains were found scattered across the formation, with exposed vertebrae in allegedly odd patterns. The McMenamins, in an abstract from a Geological Society of America meeting in 2011, proposed that the gigantic predators had all been killed and deposited there by a thirty-meter, hyperintelligent cephalopod, and that the scattered vertebrae were actually arranged in a self-portrait of the long-extinct monster. They called their speculative cephalopod the Triassic Kraken.
Researchers in the field of Triassic marine life met the idea with laughter: and, quite frankly, for good reason. There isn’t any evidence for it existing. A) The idea that modern cephalopods make art with bones is poorly supported to begin with. B) cephalopods from that time period are limited to small orthocones, belemnites, and ammonites that wouldn’t have grown more than a couple feet long at most. C) the more likely explanation for the Shonisaurus verts being arranged in wavelike patterns is that they were pushed by the water currents after deposition, something you can observe yourself by simply looking at anywhere there’s sand and moving water. But today, we don’t care that it’s a shoddily put-together hypothesis with little evidence: we’re going to take the paleocryptid that the McMenamins created, and find out how it could survive in and adapt to the alien oceans of Subnautica. Planet 4546B is FINALLY going to have a proper kraken.
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uppbeat.io/t/danijel-zambo/borders
License code: IDGLLW9DLLLJIVYZ
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uppbeat.io/t/jumpel-x-adi-goldstein/schleifen
License code: 8ST7KCUXBJHC2LJL
Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
uppbeat.io/t/simon-folwar/forward-motion
License code: UZLERVT53Y0SIOZW
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The Kraken. A symbol of terror for sailors throughout history. Typically described as a huge squid-like creature, it was feared for its ability to drag ships to the bottom of the sea with its menacing tentacles. With the benefit of hindsight and modern zoology, we ascribe sightings of such beasts to giant squid, whose arms and tentacles would strike fear into the heart of any medieval sailor with a shred of self-preservation. But in 2011, Mark and Diana McMenamin proposed the existence of a prehistoric version of the beast that had haunted humanity’s nightmares for centuries: the Triassic Kraken.
Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada is home to a huge amount of Shonisaurus fossils. Shonisaurus was a carnivorous, toothed predator the size of a humpback whale with jaws up to three meters long. Their remains were found scattered across the formation, with exposed vertebrae in allegedly odd patterns. The McMenamins, in an abstract from a Geological Society of America meeting in 2011, proposed that the gigantic predators had all been killed and deposited there by a thirty-meter, hyperintelligent cephalopod, and that the scattered vertebrae were actually arranged in a self-portrait of the long-extinct monster. They called their speculative cephalopod the Triassic Kraken.
Researchers in the field of Triassic marine life met the idea with laughter: and, quite frankly, for good reason. There isn’t any evidence for it existing. A) The idea that modern cephalopods make art with bones is poorly supported to begin with. B) cephalopods from that time period are limited to small orthocones, belemnites, and ammonites that wouldn’t have grown more than a couple feet long at most. C) the more likely explanation for the Shonisaurus verts being arranged in wavelike patterns is that they were pushed by the water currents after deposition, something you can observe yourself by simply looking at anywhere there’s sand and moving water. But today, we don’t care that it’s a shoddily put-together hypothesis with little evidence: we’re going to take the paleocryptid that the McMenamins created, and find out how it could survive in and adapt to the alien oceans of Subnautica. Planet 4546B is FINALLY going to have a proper kraken.
Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
uppbeat.io/t/danijel-zambo/borders
License code: IDGLLW9DLLLJIVYZ
Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
uppbeat.io/t/jumpel-x-adi-goldstein/schleifen
License code: 8ST7KCUXBJHC2LJL
Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
uppbeat.io/t/simon-folwar/forward-motion
License code: UZLERVT53Y0SIOZW
Join this channel to get access to perks:
youtube.com/channel/UCmkkmzfWWf4HzrO8SGO3gjw/join
