But this mysterious creature really gets a bad rap. First of all, it’s not a squid, and now, new research proves that it’s also not a vampire.

In reality, the vampire squid is a soft-bodied and passive creature, about the size, shape and color of a football. (Might even fool one of the NFL’s replacement refs.) A relict, or living fossil, it inhabits the deep waters of all the world’s ocean basins at depths where there is almost no oxygen, but also relatively few predators.

Little was known about what these cephalopods eat at these depths until Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) researchers Henk-Jan Hoving and Bruce Robison took the time (a lot of time!) to find out.

Hoving looked carefully at 23 hours of footage taken by MBARI remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) of vampire squids filmed over the past 25 years. He and Robison also used the ROVs to collect live vampire squids and study their feeding habits in the laboratory.

The scientists discovered that vampire squids use two long filaments that extend from their bodies to capture “marine snow” that drifts at these depths. As pure as marine snow may sound, it’s anything but. In reality, it includes animal feces, corpses and snot that sinks down from above. Yum!

Hoving saw the sea creatures slowly pulling in their filaments and scraping off the accumulated marine snow using their arms. Other vampire squids had globs of marine snow and mucus dangling from their mouths. Under the microscope the researchers observed that mucus-producing cells cover the vampire squid’s suckers, which the animal apparently uses to collect and glue together individual particles of marine snow. Even more yum!

Beyond the disgustingness of their diet, it’s not very nutritious. But vampire squids have an extremely energy-efficient lifestyle and unique adaptations. Their bodies are neutrally buoyant, so they don’t have to expend energy to stay at a particular depth. Even better, they don’t have to swim to find food, but simply extend their filaments to collect food that drifts past them.

You can see video of this amazing creature at Wired.

Image: MBARI

Generally animal tissue, made up mostly of protein, degrades quickly. Over the course of millions of years, the only traces an animal leaves behind are likely skeletal remains or an impression of the shape of the animal in surrounding rock. Scientists can learn much about an animal by its bones and impressions, but without organic matter they are left with many unanswered questions.

But melanin is an exception. Though organic, it resists degradation over the course of vast amounts of time.

“Out of all of the organic pigments in living systems, melanin has the highest odds of being found in the fossil record,” says John Simon of the University of Virginia. “That attribute also makes it a challenge to study.”

Simon and his colleagues used cutting edge techniques to study the melanin from 160 million-year-old cephalopod ink sacs. “We had to use innovative methods from chemistry, biology and physics to isolate the melanin from the inorganic material.”

The researchers weren’t even sure the melanin was still inside the small, inch-long sacs. They used a combination of direct, high-resolution chemical techniques to determine whether or not the melanin had been preserved. When they found melanin present, they then compared its chemical composition to the melanin in the ink of modern cuttlefish and found a match.

The researchers were somewhat amazed that the ink has changed so little over millions of years.

“It’s close enough that I would argue that the pigmentation in this class of animals has not evolved in 160 million years,” Simon explains. “The whole machinery apparently has been locked in time and passed down through succeeding generations of cuttlefish.”

As Simon tells National Geographic News:

As far as we can tell by everything we’ve thrown at it, the [ancient] ink is indistinguishable from modern ink…

… it’s a pretty good defense mechanism.

The scientists hope to use similar techniques to color-in more of ancient Earth’s organisms. Their current research is published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Image of ancient ink sac: University of Virginia

The tentacled creature, named kraken after the mythical sea monsters, took the large marine reptiles back to their dens, called middens, and dismembered them. The intelligent kraken then arranged the vertebral discs in double line patterns, with individual pieces nesting in a fitted fashion as if they were part of a puzzle. A puzzle that resembles the pattern of sucker discs on a cephalopod tentacle, with each vertebra strongly resembling a coleoid sucker.

Good one, right? A weird, creepy tale, full of mythical monsters! Except it’s not a joke or a treatment for a B-movie: it’s part of a scientific abstract presented Monday at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Minneapolis.

And then the news agencies began picking it up. So it must be true, right?

“There is no evidence that this ‘kraken’ existed,” is Rich Ross’s take on the story. Rich is the cephalopod guy here at the Academy and loves the things. He can talk to you for hours about these many-armed marine animals… (“Cuttlefish are like alien hummingbirds that hunt. They’re brutal predators. Their skin is amazing.” “Octopus are like super-caffeinated snails with arms and no shell. They’re vicious predators and their ability to camouflage is unbelievable!” You get the point. Check out his blog for more insights.) But about these kraken, he just shakes his head. “Squids don’t do middens, modern octopus wouldn’t do this either. There’s no evidence—it could’ve been anything.”

According to paleontologist Mark McMenamin, the researcher behind Monday’s presentation, the evidence is a bizarre fossil site at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada. The site holds the remains of nine 45-foot ichthyosaurs, of the species Shonisaurus popularis.

“It was a very odd configuration of bones,” according to McMenamin. The different degrees of etching on the bones suggested that the shonisaurs were not all killed and buried at the same time. It also appeared that the bones had been purposefully rearranged. That it got him thinking about a particular modern predator known for just this sort of intelligent manipulation of bones.

“Modern octopus will do this,” McMenamin explains.

Of course, it’s the perfect Triassic crime because octopuses are mostly soft-bodied and don’t fossilize well. Only their beaks are hard and the chances of those being preserved nearby are very low. That means the evidence for the murderous kraken remains purely circumstantial.

Without hard evidence, Rich Ross is incredibly skeptical. As well as many other scientists, according to Wired and Nature News. Rich sums it up well: “You could just as well say that aliens did this.”

Image: Mark McMenamin

The squid are part of an experiment to see if, like some collegiate females on spring break, good bacteria “go wild” in the microgravity of space. Bobtail squid use bacteria called Vibrio fischeri to generate light. According to Discovery News:

That light helps the squid hunt for prey in dark waters. It also provides camouflage from any organisms trying to eat him, because the squid doesn’t cast a telltale shadow on the ocean floor as a result of the moon’s rays shining down into the water.

Previous shuttle experiments have shown what happens to harmful bacteria in space, but this will be the first experiment with beneficial bacteria.  Scientists are hoping that these results with squid will translate to beneficial bacteria with humans.

The NASA press kit reports that worms are part of the mission:

One NASA experiment known as Biology (Bio) will use, among other items, C. elegans worms, that are descendants of worms that survived the STS-107 space shuttle Columbia accident.

Haven’t these worms been through enough?!

Wired UK has a breakdown of other microbes joining STS134:

The microbes on-board Endeavour include the tardigrades (nicknamed Water Bears) which are large extremophiles that can withstand temperatures as biting as absolute zero, and as hot as 150 degrees Celsius. They’re joined by the Deinococcus radiodurans (which NASA dubbed “Conan the Bacterium“) which can survive upward of 15,000 Gy of radiation — 10 Gy is more than enough to kill an average human.

Haloarcula marismortui (Old Salty) loves salt, and lives in levels of high salinity that would kill other organisms. Pyrococcus furiosus (Fire Eater) is all about heat, and thrives in temperatures over 100 degrees Celsius. Cupriavidus metallidurans (which doesn’t have a nickname, unfortunately) plays a vital role in the formation of gold nuggets, thanks to its love of gold tetrachloride: a compound that is toxic to most other microorganisms.

Finally there’s Bacillus subtilis (The Average Joe), which is a model organism used in hundreds of biological experiments. It’s been into space many times before, so it’ll be a good comparison point for other studies.

You know, Dorothy only had lions and tigers and bears to face in Oz…

Image by Hans Hillewaert/Wikimedia