Aquila Children's Magazine AQUILA Magazine Best Bits | Page 19

GiaNt sQuid
For hundreds of years, sailors have told
tales of a sea monster – the Kraken
– whose huge tentacles rose out of the
sea and dragged ships down into the
deep. But they remained just stories; no
one had ever seen one (or lived to tell the
tale, anyway). The first real evidence for
the existence of giant squid arrived in
1857, when one was washed up on a
beach in Denmark.
In 1873, a 12-year-old Canadian boy
hacked a 6-metre tentacle off a creature
that came up to their rowboat (uncalled
for. Again. What is our problem?
Ed) . A giant squid washed up on the
shore the next year and was finally
photographed.
GoriLlas
Hanno, a Phoenician who lived in the
Mediterranean in about 500 BCE, wrote
about his voyage around Africa. He
found an island full of hairy creatures
who were very powerful and, when
seized, became so violent that Hanno
had to kill them. He took their shaggy
skins back to Carthage, where they
stayed until the Romans destroyed the
town. Incredibly, gorillas remained
nothing but a story until 1847, when an
American found skulls of ‘a very
unusual chimpanzee’ in Liberia. It was
not until the 1880s that live gorillas
were brought to Europe.
OkaPiS
‘We’ve been told of a stripy donkey in
Africa’, European explorers said in the
1880s. ‘It has a long neck like a giraffe
and a tongue it can lick its own eyes
with’. Well, the scientists back in Europe
didn’t believe it at all; they even called
it the ‘African unicorn’, because surely it
was just a mythical creature. They had
to change their minds though, when a
baby okapi was captured and its body
brought back in 1909.
(Why are all these animals winding
up dead? This is a horrible list!)
Good question. Early explorers weren‘t
as concerned with conservation as most
people are now.
KomoDo dRagoNs
In 1910, Dutch settlers in Indonesia
simply refused to believe the locals’
tales of 20-foot-long monstrous lizards
living on Komodo Island, so a Dutch
army officer went to see them for
himself. He was astonished to find the
island was full of these prehistoric-
looking lizards. Admittedly, they were a
little smaller than the tales had
specified (but their saliva was still as
poisonous!). More expeditions followed,
and a photo and a preserved skin were
displayed in 1912, to prove they really
did exist.
Of course, while foreign scientists were
scoffing at the existence of such
‘impossible’ animals, the people who
lived alongside these creatures always
knew they existed. It just took a while for
others to believe them!
Gillian
that this was just another hoax. He
tried to find the stitches that MUST
have been used to fit the bill onto
the animal.
Giant squid rarely come to the surface of
the sea. It’s really difficult to find
creatures in the deepest parts of the
ocean, even if they are 13 metres long, so
it wasn’t until 2004 that some Japanese
scientists managed to photograph a live
giant squid, and not until 2012 that one
was filmed alive actually in the sea!