Giant Squid Invades New York! Natural History Museum, That Is

It may have arrived in New York in a box labeled “seafood,” but this squid isn’t your ordinary calamari.

The American Museum of Natural History on Tuesday opened to the public its display of the world’s best-preserved specimen of a giant squid, a mysterious, deep-sea creature whose habits never have been observed in the wild.

The squid, netted by commercial fishermen off the coast of New Zealand in 1997, is a 25-foot-long male weighing 250 pounds. It’s so large that the museum had to fold its two long tentacles to fit the creature into a specially designed display case.

“It reminds us of the wonderful life we have on Earth,” said Neil Landman, the museum’s paleontology curator and an expert in cephalopods, the class of marine mollusks that includes squids.

The giant squid, or Architeuthis kirki, is the stuff of legend. Jules Verne made the elusive animal a bloodthirsty beast in his “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” Fantastic tales of sea monsters and serpents have been told by mariners since the time of Homer.

Everything about the giant squid is gigantic. It’s the world’s largest invertebrate, reaching lengths of up to 70 feet from the tip of its head to the tip of its tentacles. It has eyes the size of soccer balls, a huge, parrot-like beak, eight arms and two long tentacles, each equipped with dozens of suckers armed with small teeth.

Giant squids live at depths of 3,000 feet below the sea, dine on fish and other squid and are suspected of being one of the more intelligent species in the ocean.

Scientists admit they know little about the creatures.