Species That Don't Get Enough Publicity #10: Tusoteuthis

Giant squids are iconic animals. Squids by themselves are intelligent, powerful, and alien-looking. Giant squids give grandeur, epic scale, and mystery, having not been seen in their natural habitat until 2004. Although not as long as a bootlace worm or as heavy as a colossal squid, they have become legendary. Their corpses and fleeting sightings of their dying have created legends in places from Norway to Greece to Japan.  The Norse sailors and Vikings prayed for safety from the Kraken, a beast so powerful it is still part of modern popular culture.

Top 10 Dinosaur fights in fiction

Everyone loves dinosaur fights. All the best dinosaur films have them. What’s better than big, bizarre prehistoric creatures? When they duke it out! They can be violent, they can be bloody, but they’re always exciting.  The very first would be the Ghost of Slumber mountain, where two Triceratops duel and one of them is then killed by a Tyrannosaurus in a fight. The last would be the Pachyrhinosaurus-Gorgosaurus brawl at the climax of Walking With Dinosaurs.  Hopefully this year’s Jurassic World will have the decency of giving us one.  Most of these fights are wildly anachronistic between supersized versions, and some of them involve animals that are not dinosaurs or even real animals, but it gives that element of fantasy that dinosaurs invoke by their very prescence. This list is entirely subjective, so I’ll leave a long list of runners up first-