The following guest post by Eric Michael Johnson is part of the Primate Diaries in Exile blog tour. You can follow other stops on this tour through his RSS feed…
Attack of the giant squid! (1874)
Last week, I ventured outside of my usual areas of expertise to discuss a paper I had stumbled across in a volume of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, dated 1790, “letter relative to the kraken”. This prompted Sarah of The Language of Bad Physics to ask,
I love the articles you find for these. It got me looking, can you find the actual sources for NfL sightings? The 1873 “attack”?
It was an awesome question, and I knew immediately what she was talking about! For those who don’t know, in 1873 a fisherman had a genuine battle with a giant squid off the coast of Newfoundland. This battle, the only one of its kind I am aware of, was also momentous in that it resulted in the first giant squid specimen studied scientifically on land!
I was immediately intrigued, and went searching. With my uber-internet search skills, I managed to find the paper within an hour! The article is a letter by M. Murray, “Capture of a gigantic squid at Newfoundland,” The American Naturalist 8 (1874), 120-124.¹
Though if I keep writing posts about ocean life, I’m going to bring down the wrath of the Southern Friend Science Network or Deep Sea News upon me, I can’t resist discussing this paper. Giant squid have been a topic of fascination for me for years, and this letter is too much fun!