Millions of years ago, our oceans were ruled by giant squid and tentacled monsters with towering shells up to 26 feet tall.
In a new Netflix documentary, Life on Our Planet, these creatures have been brought to life in never-before-seen detail.
"Ancient cephalopods [a class of ocean animals that includes squid and octopuses] like Cameroceras and its relatives were monstrous cone-shelled animals that would have hovered and drifted across the sea floor looking for prey," Tom Fletcher, scientific consultant for the series, told Newsweek.
"[It had] a huge shell, dwarfing a squid-like head, with large eyes and arms, curiously and systematically grasping and probing between the rocks," he said.
These tentacled titans lived roughly 470 million years ago, going extinct about 30 million years later. "The modern descendants of these animals, the coil-shelled Nautilus, are small and harmless by comparison," Fletcher said. "In contrast, the fossils we have of the extinct species, pieces of the shell, are so tantalizing because they reveal how enormous these animals were."
Cameroceras fossils have been found in China, Europe and North America, but visualizing their soft, tentacled bodies is a difficult feat.
"We had to put our detective hats on and look to modern and extinct relatives to rebuild the missing pieces," Fletcher said. "Talking to the experts was really important to get this animal right. They told us what the soft parts of these creatures would have looked like, how they would have moved, how they would have lived, how they would have hunted. The experts told us about very rare occasions where soft tissues—things like tentacles and internal organs—of animals like this are fossilized, so we could use those to build up an accurate picture."
The team also looked at modern cephalopods, like cuttlefish, octopuses and squid, to learn more about how this creature might have moved and how intelligent it might have been. "Its closest living relative, the Nautilus, has barely changed in hundreds of millions of years, and that gave us some clues and a nice scientific envelope to work within," Fletcher said.
The video above shows the monstrous squid as it hunts down its prey, extending its tentacles through the crags and crevices of a rocky reef.
Cameroceras is just one of the millions of magnificent species that have been lost to history. In fact, the 20 million or so species that live on Earth today are thought to represent just 1 percent of all of the species that have called this planet home.
"The story of life is the greatest story of them all, full of drama, of chaos, of evolution and revolution. The story of life is not some predictable walk through the past," series producer Dan Tapster, told Newsweek.
"Instead, it's a story of chance and chaos, of luck and loss.... It's nature's very own Game of Thrones, a story that has to be seen to be believed. Showing...our ancestors is crucial for us to understand our place in the world. Moreover, showing them in a way that's accurate is super important to give them veracity."
For the series, which premieres Wednesday, the team used cutting-edge technology and scientific research to re-create these creatures with unprecedented accuracy.
"We wanted the VFX [visual effects] to sit seamlessly alongside our natural history and so had to reinvent the way VFX are filmed," Tapster said. "Instead of going for the usual Hollywood style—where you might, say, film a T. rex from 6 feet away—we pioneered a system we called time-travel cinematography, where we discussed how we would film a prehistoric creature if we were really able to travel back in time to film it. This meant that we were applying modern-day natural history techniques to our VFX scenes."
Tapster said that he hopes the series—which is narrated by Morgan Freeman and executive-produced by Steven Spielberg—will give viewers a new appreciation for prehistoric life on Earth while highlighting the importance of protecting creatures that inhabit our planet today.
"Right now, life is at a tipping point as we enter the sixth mass extinction," he said. "The series showcases very clearly the calamitous events of the previous five. Yet as we enter the sixth there is a clear difference: This is the first extinction event to be caused by a single species, but it's also the first that can be stopped. I hope that the series allows the audience to understand the disasters of the past so that we together can save our future."
About the writer
Pandora Dewan is a Senior Science Reporter at Newsweek based in London, UK. Her focus is reporting on science, health ... Read more
