Smithsonian Magazine

This Bone-Crunching Octopus Was Nearly the Size of a Semitruck and May Have Feasted on Giant Reptiles 100 Million Years Ago

The massive invertebrates may have been top predators, according to an analysis of their fossilized jaws. The work suggests ...

'Gigantic' ancient octopus used jaws to crush prey and hunted alongside the dinosaurs 100M years ago: study

Octopuses' earliest relatives may have been gigantic predators hunting during the age of dinosaurs, according to new Hokkaido ...

Meet The Octopus With Enough Venom To Kill 26 Humans. Hint: It’s The Size Of A Golf Ball

This unassuming octopus pairs bacterial chemistry with evolutionary efficiency to deliver one of the most powerful defenses ...

Jaw fossils suggest a 60-foot octopus was the ‘kraken’ of the Cretaceous

The ancient cephalopod, Nanaimoteuthis haggarti, appears to have been an apex predator that rivaled mosasaurs to rule ...

Blue-ringed octopus: This tiny creature has venom powerful enough to kill 26 humans within minutes

Among the ocean's most dangerous creatures, size isn't everything; in fact, some of the smallest marine animals are among the ...

The ‘World's Oldest Octopus' Held That Title for 25 Years. It's Not Really an Octopus.

A team cracked the case by examining the fossil using a synchrotron, which produces beams of light by accelerating electrons ...

Scientists just discovered a 60-foot-long, kraken-like octopus

The discovery, using novel techniques to analyze fossilized jaws, details how colossal octopuses hunted the Late Cretaceous ...

Diver convinces a tiny octopus to trade a plastic cup for a shell in Pixar-worthy video

A video shows a diver in Indonesia spending an entire dive convincing a tiny coconut octopus to swap its plastic cup home for ...