00:00For centuries, sailors have swapped terrifying stories about a massive, multi-armed leviathan
00:07tearing apart ships in the open ocean. Science usually tells a much more structured story about
00:14ancient oceans. In the Cretaceous period, we've assumed the absolute top of the food chain
00:19belonged strictly to giant, heavily armored reptiles like the mosasaur. But paleontologists
00:25recently uncovered the remains of Nanaimotuthis haggerty. It's a 62-foot-long finned octopus
00:32that hunted in those exact same waters, easily rivaling those massive reptiles in sheer size.
00:38The massive, tentacled beasts of maritime folklore actually existed. They were simply a biological
00:45ghost missing from our history books. Finding an ancient octopus is incredibly difficult because
00:51of how they're built. They have no bones and no hard external shell. After they die,
00:56they turn almost completely invisible in the fossil record. The only part of their body tough
01:01enough to withstand millions of years of pressure is the beak. It's made of chitin, the same durable
01:07material you'll find in crab shells and insect exoskeletons. To find these tiny, rare surviving
01:13pieces, researchers had to use a new technique called digital fossil mining, powered by zero-shot
01:19learning AI. The software allowed them to virtually slice through solid carbonate rocks gathered
01:25from Japan and Canada. By analyzing the interiors, the AI detected and generated 3D scans of 12 ancient
01:32octopus jaws that were completely hidden from the surface. Without that artificial intelligence
01:37mapping the inside of the rock, the physical remains of this apex predator would have stayed buried.
01:42The fossils revealed two distinct species, an older animal called Nani motuthis Jeletsky,
01:48and its younger, much larger relative, Nani motuthis Hagerty. To figure out how big they actually
01:54grew, scientists took the dimensions of these fossilized jaws and scaled them up against the
01:59body proportions of living long-bodied finned octopuses. Looking at this scale, the upper estimates for
02:06an Hagerty are staggering. The animal reached lengths stretching to 62 feet. That puts it well beyond a
02:13modern giant squid, and squarely in the same weight class as a Cretaceous mosasaur. These jaws also show
02:20us exactly how it hunted. The tips of the adult beaks weren't sharp. The top 10% of the beak's
02:27length was
02:27heavily chipped and ground completely flat. You only see this extreme damage when an animal spends its life
02:34aggressively crushing heavy ammonites, shelled mollusks, and the bones of other marine creatures.
02:39Curiously, the damage wasn't even. The right side of the beak was consistently more worn than the left.
02:45This indicates lateralized behavior, meaning the octopus favored one side of its body,
02:51much like a human being right-handed. In modern animals, that physical preference points to a highly
02:57complex nervous system. The fossils outline an animal that relied on high intelligence and immense crushing
03:03power to hunt heavily armored prey. For roughly 400 million years, animals with bones and backbones held a
03:10strict monopoly on the highest levels of the ocean food web. N. Hagerty bypassed that evolutionary arms
03:17race. By shedding a heavy external shell, it gained the agility and the massive size needed to compete
03:24directly with marine reptiles. This graphic breaks down the traditional Cretaceous marine food web.
03:29We've always placed sharks and giant reptiles at the absolute top. Now we redraw the map. This massive
03:37invertebrate forces its way in, making those giant reptiles share the apex predator space. To dominate an
03:44ecosystem full of heavily armored targets, you didn't actually need thick armor or a skeleton of your own.
03:50The legendary kraken swam the earth 72 million years ago. Its soft-bodied anatomy was perfectly evolved for the
03:58hunt, but it also caused this creature to vanish from the fossil record almost entirely. If an apex predator
04:04this massive hid from science for millions of years, what else might be swimming undetected in the deep
04:10ocean today? Let us know what undiscovered deep-sea monsters you think are hiding in the comments below,
04:15and make sure to like and subscribe for more deep-sea mysteries.
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