Giant squid grabs London audience
View at BBC NEWS
One of the biggest and most complete giant squids ever found is on display at London's Natural History Museum.
Measuring a monstrous 8.62m (28ft), the animal was caught off the coast of the Falkland Islands by a trawler.
Researchers at the museum undertook a painstaking process to preserve the giant creature, which is now on show in a 9m- (30ft-) long glass tank.
Giant squid, once thought to be sea serpents, are very rarely seen and live at depths of 200-1,000m (650-3,300ft).
They can weigh up to a 1,000kg; the largest ever spotted measured a vast 18.5m and was found in 1880 off Island Bay in New Zealand.
'Most giant squid tend to be washed up dead on beaches, or retrieved from the stomach of sperm whales, so they tend to be in quite poor condition,' explained Jon Ablett, the mollusc curator at the Natural History Museum who led preservation efforts.
As a result, finding such a large, complete specimen was something of a rarity, he said.
Archie the squid
The team nicknamed the creature Archie, after its Latin name Architeuthis dux, but it may have to revise this after finding out that the squid is probably female.
One of the biggest and most complete giant squids ever found is on display at London's Natural History Museum.Measuring a monstrous 8.62m (28ft), the animal was caught off the coast of the Falkland Islands by a trawler.
Researchers at the museum undertook a painstaking process to preserve the giant creature, which is now on show in a 9m- (30ft-) long glass tank.
Giant squid, once thought to be sea serpents, are very rarely seen and live at depths of 200-1,000m (650-3,300ft).
They can weigh up to a 1,000kg; the largest ever spotted measured a vast 18.5m and was found in 1880 off Island Bay in New Zealand.
'Most giant squid tend to be washed up dead on beaches, or retrieved from the stomach of sperm whales, so they tend to be in quite poor condition,' explained Jon Ablett, the mollusc curator at the Natural History Museum who led preservation efforts.
As a result, finding such a large, complete specimen was something of a rarity, he said.
Archie the squid
The team nicknamed the creature Archie, after its Latin name Architeuthis dux, but it may have to revise this after finding out that the squid is probably female.
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