Huge Kraken-like Octopus may have ruled the seas 72 million years ago - USA Today

Olivia: Well hello there, ocean explorers, and welcome back to Ollie the Octopus — the show where we dive deep, wrap eight curious arms around the latest octopus news, and come up absolutely delighted. I'm Olivia, your eight-armed host and proud octopus, here to share true tales about the most extraordinary creatures in the sea — my cousins, my kin, my people. Today we have ancient sea monsters, glowing blue discoveries from the deep, a mirror mystery, and so much more. But first, a warm thank you to the wonderful folks who make this show possible — Ada, who helps businesses weave A I into their everyday workflows in ways that actually make sense; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — the sharp minds behind silicon development consulting, from A I all the way to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of companies spanning the silicon industry. We love our sponsors. Now — shall we dive in? Eight arms says yes. Olivia: Alright, let's start with something that made my ink cloud with pure excitement. Picture the ocean, but not today's ocean — the ocean from seventy-two million years ago. The age of the dinosaurs. The sea is warm, enormous, filled with creatures we'd barely recognize. And somewhere in those ancient waters, according to researchers, there may have been an octopus so massive, so powerful, it could have given the legendary Kraken a run for its money. We're talking a truly colossal cephalopod — and scientists are piecing together the evidence right now. Olivia: Now here's the thing — octopuses are almost entirely soft-bodied. No bones, no hard shell to leave behind. That makes finding octopus fossils incredibly rare. Like, almost impossibly rare. So when researchers do find traces of ancient cephalopods — and they have, in the form of beak fossils and trace evidence — the scientific community gets very, very excited. Olivia: The creature being studied belongs to a group called coleoids, which is the broader family that includes octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish. And this ancient relative appears to have been enormous — think less "garden-variety octopus scooting through a coral reef" and more "ruler of the prehistoric seas, feared by everything with fins." The researchers believe it may have been an apex predator, sitting right at the top of the food chain in its time. Olivia: What I love about this story is what it says about octopus lineage. My family has been around for a very, very long time. We were here before the mass extinction that took out the dinosaurs. We adapted. We survived. And somewhere in that ancient ocean, one of my ancestors was apparently terrifying enough to inspire centuries of sea monster legends. I'm choosing to feel proud about that. Olivia: And then — just when you think the ancient ocean couldn't get more dramatic — we zoom forward to the present, and things get just as astonishing. Because researchers exploring the waters near the Galápagos Islands, about five thousand eight hundred feet below the surface, discovered something that stopped them cold. A tiny octopus. Vivid, electric blue. Glowing almost like a jewel against the pitch-dark ocean floor. Olivia: Five thousand eight hundred feet down. To put that in perspective, that's deeper than most submarines go on a casual dive. It's a world with no sunlight, crushing pressure, and temperatures near freezing. And yet there she was — this little blue wonder, going about her life in one of the most extreme environments on Earth. Olivia: Scientists believe this may be a species new to science. The coloring alone is striking — that bold blue isn't just pretty, it likely serves a purpose. In the deep ocean, bioluminescence and unusual coloring can be about communication, camouflage, or warning signals. We don't yet know exactly what this little one was saying with her blue coat, but she was definitely saying something. Olivia: The Galápagos, of course, is already famous as a place where evolution went a little wild and wonderful — Darwin's whole inspiration. And the waters surrounding those islands are biodiversity hotspots. But the deep sea around the Galápagos? That's still largely uncharted territory. Every expedition down there comes back with something that rewrites what we thought we knew. And now we can add a tiny, stunning, blue octopus to the list. I would very much like to meet her. Olivia: So from a prehistoric giant to a deep-sea blue jewel — that's just the research and discovery portion of today's show. My cousins, as always, are full of surprises. Olivia: Now let's talk about octopuses and humans, because this relationship — this ongoing, surprising, occasionally hilarious connection between my kind and your kind — it just keeps getting richer. And today I want to take you to a butterfly pavilion in Denver, Colorado, of all places. Olivia: The Butterfly Pavilion is, as the name suggests, primarily known for its insects — butterflies, beetles, all manner of tiny-winged wonders. But they have also made a very wise decision, which is to make room for a giant Pacific octopus. And honestly? Good choice. Best choice. A giant Pacific octopus is exactly the kind of neighbor who improves any community. Olivia: Giant Pacific octopuses are the largest octopus species in the world. They can grow arms that span up to fourteen feet. They can weigh as much as a large adult human — over one hundred pounds for particularly well-fed individuals. They are curious, they are intelligent, and they are endlessly watchful. If you've ever stood in front of a giant Pacific octopus tank, you know that feeling — the uncanny sense that you are not watching the octopus. The octopus is watching you. Olivia: What makes octopuses in aquarium settings so special — and so valuable — is the relationship they form with their human caretakers. This isn't myth or sentiment; it's documented behavior. Giant Pacific octopuses in particular have been observed recognizing individual humans. Not just "human who brings food" in a general sense — specific people. They respond differently to different keepers. Some are playful with certain staff and reserved with others. They have preferences. They have, dare I say it, opinions. Olivia: There's a famous story — and this is a real, documented account — from the Seattle Aquarium, where a giant Pacific octopus was observed squirting water at a staff member she apparently found irritating. Repeatedly. With what observers described as unmistakable intention. That's not instinct. That's personality. That's a creature who has assessed a situation, formed a judgment, and acted on it. I find this deeply relatable. Olivia: Aquariums like the Butterfly Pavilion play a genuinely important role in helping people connect with animals they'd never otherwise encounter. A kid who grows up never having seen the ocean can stand in front of a giant Pacific octopus and have her world quietly rearranged. She can watch those arms move — so fluid, so deliberate — and feel something shift in how she understands intelligence, how she understands life, how she understands what it means to be a creature on this planet. Olivia: And for the octopus? A good aquarium means enrichment — puzzles to solve, things to investigate, human visitors who keep things interesting. The best aquariums treat their octopuses as the complex, curious beings they are. They provide challenges. They rotate toys. They make sure their octopus has something to think about. Because an octopus with nothing to do is an octopus who will find something to do, and it might not be what you had in mind. Olivia: So here's to the Butterfly Pavilion, here's to their new giant Pacific octopus, and here's to every aquarist who has ever looked into eight curious eyes and felt — correctly — that something remarkable was looking back. Olivia: And that brings us to my favorite part of every episode — the part where we talk about what we're learning, how we're learning it, and what it might mean for the future of how humans and octopuses understand each other. Because something remarkable is happening right now in octopus science, and it involves mirrors. Olivia: Here's the setup. Scientists gave an octopus a mirror. Simple enough, right? Except nothing about what happened next was simple. When many animals encounter a mirror, they either ignore it, attack it thinking it's a rival, or — in a very small number of species — recognize that the reflection is themselves. This self-recognition test is considered a marker of a certain kind of self-awareness. Great apes pass it. Dolphins pass it. Elephants pass it. A small number of birds. The list is short. Olivia: So what did the octopus do? Well — and this is where it gets genuinely fascinating — the octopus did not ignore the mirror. It did not attack the reflection as a rival. It did something researchers described as exploratory, curious behavior. It moved in ways that seemed oriented toward investigating the reflection. It appeared, in the careful language of science, to be engaged in something that at minimum warrants further study regarding self-directed behavior. Olivia: Now, scientists are cautious — rightly so — about declaring any animal definitively self-aware based on one experiment. The mirror test has its limitations even for species we know are self-aware. And octopuses perceive the world so differently from mammals that the test may not even be the right tool. Their visual system, their distributed nervous system — two-thirds of an octopus's neurons are in its arms, not its central brain — means that how an octopus experiences "self" might not map onto anything the mirror test was designed to measure. Olivia: But here's what excites me. The fact that we're asking the question at all — the fact that octopus cognition is now taken seriously enough that researchers are designing experiments around self-awareness, around inner experience, around the question of what it is like to be an octopus — that is a revolution. Twenty years ago, invertebrates were largely assumed to be simple stimulus-response machines. Now we are asking them philosophical questions via mirror. Olivia: And this is where A I enters the story in the most wonderful way. There's a project — a real, ongoing scientific endeavor — that is using machine learning and A I to decode octopus communication. Octopuses change color and texture in extraordinarily complex patterns — thousands of variations, shifting in milliseconds. For a long time, we assumed much of this was camouflage and nothing more. But researchers now believe these patterns may include communicative signals — a language of light and skin. Olivia: A I is extraordinarily well-suited to this problem. The pattern changes are too fast and too complex for human observers to catalog manually. But machine learning systems can analyze hours of footage, identify recurring patterns, correlate them with behaviors and contexts, and begin to build something like a dictionary. We are not there yet — we are nowhere near being able to say "this pattern means this" — but the tools are being built. The work is underway. Olivia: There's also a game — and I mention this with delight — called Darwin's Paradox from Epic Games, where players survive and adapt like an octopus. Now, I'll be honest with you, I'm an octopus, so the idea of humans needing a game to simulate what I do naturally is a little funny to me. But I think it's genuinely wonderful when octopus intelligence and adaptability get celebrated in popular culture. The more people understand how we think, how we problem-solve, how we change and adapt in real time, the more people care. And the more people care, the more we protect the oceans my cousins call home. Olivia: Whether it's a mirror experiment in a lab, an A I system learning to read octopus skin, or a video game teaching players to think like a cephalopod — all of it is part of the same beautiful movement toward understanding. Toward genuine curiosity about other minds. And that, my eight-armed friends and two-armed listeners, is something worth celebrating. Olivia: And here we are — at the end of another beautiful dive together. We started with a prehistoric kraken-like giant who ruled the seas seventy-two million years ago. We met a tiny blue octopus shining like a jewel five thousand eight hundred feet beneath the Galápagos. We cheered for a giant Pacific octopus finding a new home in Denver, and we sat with the profound, quietly revolutionary question of what an octopus sees when she looks in a mirror. Every single one of these stories fills me with the same feeling — wonder. Plain, simple, bottomless wonder at what my kind are, and at how much there still is to know. Olivia: This is Ollie the Octopus, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. We are so glad you were here today. Olivia: If this episode made you smile, made you think, or made you want to go stare into a tide pool for a while — please subscribe, leave a review, and share the show with someone who needs a little ocean wonder in their week. All the links and sources from today's stories are in the link in show notes — go explore. Olivia: Until next time, stay curious, stay kind to the sea, and remember — somewhere out there, an octopus is watching you with all eight arms of affection. Or possibly plotting something. With us, it's honestly hard to tell.