It was indeed a true giant squid! And the article is quite good, gushing alliteratively about "the museum's mollusc master" using "surgical sweeps of the scalpel" to investigate. Just a few points to clarify:
As giant squids are cannibals and the females larger than the males, breeding involves the male squid firing sperm at the female, where it lodges under her skin.This makes it sound like the male' penis is some sort of ranged weapon, aiming and firing from a distance. Not so. It is probably more like an air hammer, using pressure to inject sperm under the skin of the female's arms. (This is, of course, speculation based on circumstantial evidence, as no one has yet seen these squid mating.)
The examination of the stomach did not reveal the squid's last meal but Dr Norman was not expecting too much as squid use their sharp teeth to "puree" their food into tiny pieces. Their esophagus runs through their doughnut-shaped brain and large meals can leave the squids with serious headaches.All well-written and true! Except for one thing: squid do not use their "sharp teeth" to "puree" anything. They use their sharp beaks to take relatively small bites, which are then swallowed whole. Squid have no teeth in the conventional sense of the word. They have a toothed tongue, called a radula, that is just a little rougher than a cat's tongue, and works velcro-style to grab bites of food and move them down the esophagus.
Want to know more about how squid eat?
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