It’s very cool that, the Telegraph reports and MSN echoes, “Giant ‘kraken-like’ octopuses ate dinosaurs. Fossilised jaw bones reveal strength of mysterious prehistoric hunters that dominated ancient oceans”. It challenges what we thought we knew about the prehistoric world so it feeds on the settled science. But it’s also scary. And not in the “just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water” sense, if for some reason you had thought so. Scary because it tells you that science journalism is wildly inaccurate even without an ax to grind. Imagine how badly it goes wrong when there are ideological and financial pressures as with, what’s that one? Oh yeah. Climate.

The kraken story says:

“For decades, scientists believed that prehistoric oceans were ruled entirely by large vertebrates such as sharks and giant reptiles, with invertebrates serving as prey. But the findings suggest that giant cephalopods did not merely lurk in the shadows, but rivalled and even targeted other giant predators such as mosasaurs.”

The trouble is, the story contains no actual evidence that these octopodes (Nanaimoteuthis haggarti) actually did eat mosasaurs. And even worse, mosasaurs are not dinosaurs. And if you think we’re nitpicking, that elasmosaurs or something were dinosaurs, no. Here’s a complete list of ocean-going dinosaurs: . Correct. There weren’t any. If only the journalist had Google on his computer.

It gets worse. The story says the paleo octopus was “four times the size of a great white shark” and shows it at 19m, where a great white is around 5. But anyone who has done math, and not floundered, or has read How to Lie with Statistics and remembered the trick of a bar chart with avatars correctly showing something twice the Y-axis value of something else while giving the unwarranted impression that it’s four times as big, is aware that “size” is an imprecise term.

If something is twice the length of something else is it twice as big? Yes, if it’s the same width and height. But if it’s twice as wide as well, it’s four times the size, if you mean total mass, and if it’s also twice as high, then eight times. Powers of two, don’t you know?

No. Apparently they don’t. Science journalism nowadays is written, and edited, by people unfamiliar even with such obvious considerations. And now for the mosasaur sandwich. The article explains that:

“By analysing the bones’ wear and tear – which was similar to damage seen in modern shell-crushing cephalopods – the scientists concluded the animals were ‘active carnivores that frequently crushed hard shells and bone’.”

Yes. Makes sense. And then “In the largest specimens, the jaws were heavily worn and blunted, indicating repeated use against tough, skeletal prey” which arguably just makes the same point again. But where in it is there any realistic evidence that they ate mosasaurs?

It might seem more cautious, except that four times bit, that the piece says:

“The creatures, which lived during the Late Cretaceous period about 100-72 million years ago, may have grown up to 19m in length, four times the size of a great white shark, and rivalled other ferocious apex predators long thought to dominate ancient oceans.”

In that telling they only “rival” mosasaurs rather than eating them like popcorn or, it being the ocean, popcorn shrimp. And it is possible that in addition to chasing the same prey they occasionally got into battles with thins they “rivalled”, over food, territory, a sudden encounter or just a bad mood. It’s not the same as them having “dominated” the oceans, let alone gobbled down plesiosaurs (the cool long-necked, paddle-flippered Loch-Ness style marine apex predator) and pliosaurs (the short-necked kind, actually a subset of plesiosaurs) let alone mosasaurs, the biggest sea-going reptiles. But note also the “up to” and the “may have”. As usual, we say “unless it didn’t”, especially as the story then explains that:

“Measurements of the jaws suggest that N. haggarti in particular reached extraordinary sizes, with estimated total body lengths of between seven and 19m, potentially making it the largest invertebrate ever identified.”

Unless it wasn’t. Because at seven metres it’s smaller than a modern giant squid, aka Mr. Architeuthis. So the entire story in the formerly skeptical and acerbic Telegraph is speculative clickbait. And if they can get something that wrong, and insubstantial, on a matter where nobody has a direct interest

As we have said repeatedly, at CDN we are not credentialists. We long objected to the “not a climate scientist” trope, partly because it had a strange tendency to exclude fields like atmospheric physics that were central to climate but even more because we believe in the educated lay person who takes an active interest in all sorts of fields in which they do not hold a doctorate. (As we’ve also said repeatedly, anyone who does not trust, admire and advocate such an approach really should oppose self-government, since voters are required in election campaigns to judge party proposals across a very wide range of areas from economics to geopolitics to the arts and few of us possess a dozen PhDs.)

Nevertheless when we read this kind of clickbait riddled with errors, we do go and look and discover without much surprise that the author has a BA in English (a good start) and then an MA in Magazine Journalism (an insult to academia). That the story also achieves the modern journalistic feat of including hyperlinks to “octopuses” and even “fossils”, in case the readers are ill-informed dunces, it does not include a link to the story in case they would prefer not to be.

Since we do have Google we found the paper and you can too because it’s here and its press release, modern science being what it is, is here. And it’s also worth noting that as octopodes are soft-bodied they don’t fossilize well so all we have on these critters is “isolated beaks”. Which is one reason why, Wikipedia says:

“The species N. haggarti may have been among the largest cephalopods ever to live, with an estimated total length potentially between 6.6 and 18.6 metres (22 and 61 ft), though some researchers have expressed doubt on the upper end of the estimate.”

Of course Wikipedia has its own issues too. But surely a journalist could check it and find as a followup to that point that:

“Other researchers doubted that the upper end of the length estimate was accurate, including Christian Klug, a cephalopod palaeontologist at the University of Zurich, who stated that the estimates were ‘quite extreme’, and noted that there is a level of uncertainty about the animal due to only the jaws fossilizing.”

If you’re thinking this story has little to do with climate and maybe we need a vacation, we do. But not before observing that climate science journalism has the same or worse tendency to sensationalize, muff math, misstate findings, overstate the solidity of evidence and utterly fail to mention highly relevant dissent within the field.

And a final climate note: all these creatures lived at a time when global temperature is thought to have been about 10˚C warmer than today, atmospheric CO2 was between 1,000 and 2,000 ppm, and instead of a runaway effect, horrible weather and mass extinction life flourished on a scale unimaginable today. Or was gobbled down by life that was doing so. Such as a new raptor Kank autralis found in Patagonia:

“If Spinosaurus was a ‘hell heron’ stalking shallow shores, then you can think of this 50-pound predator as an ‘evil egret’ or a ‘dinosaur stork.’ And paleontologists say it reveals a new glimpse into life before the asteroid impact that obliterated the non-avian dinosaurs. ‘One of the clear patterns we’re seeing in southern South America is that dinosaur diversity was much higher than we thought,’ says Diego Pol, a National Geographic Explorer and paleontologist at the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences, who discovered the new species with his team.”

So, warmth and CO2 not bad for life, huh?