Richard Ellis posted this editorial on Mollusca-L.
 
NEW YORK TIMES, June 15, 1998
 
The Squid on Central Park West
 
        Blanched in death, with a rising odor, a giant squid - one of the
best-preserved examples of this rarely seen species - lay thawing on a
plastic-sheathed workroom floor at the American Museum of Natural History
last week.  A worker misted its arms and tentacles with a spray bottle.
Another gently turned the tip of a 20-foot tentacle to photograph the
squid's suckers.  A press photographer straddled the head and aimed his
flash directly at the visually confusing region where head and mantle
become mouth and arms.
        A crowd of museum staff members looked on, and beyond them, through a pair
of swinging doors, an enormous freight elevator began to ferry up the
television crews, as though this were the start of a science fiction movie
that could not really begin until the ingenue-scientist walked in fresh
from makeup.
        The squid was caught by commercial fishermen at a depth of about 2,000
feet off New Zealand in December. It was frozen aboard ship and eventually
flown to New York City, where it arrived last Wednesday. It is male,
perhaps 5 to 6 years old, and it had. been frozen along with an immature
giant squid lacking the two long tentacles of its fellow.  What
particularly pleased Dr. Neil Landman, curator of invertebrates at the
museum, was the condition of the squid's beak, which has the shape of a
parrot's beak but looks, in fact, more like a beautifully modeled seashell,
deep chocolate brown at its sharp ends and paling as it thickens.  The
rusty mottling that would have covered the squid's mantle in life - a life
about which virtually nothing is known - still persisted in the tentacles.
        In a sense this squid, Architeuthis kirki, suggested the cephalopods for
sale in fish markets (usually a species called Loligo opalescens) rather
than the monsters preyed upon by sperm whales and described by Jules Verne
and Herman Melville.  Each time a giant squid has been sighted - and there
have been fewer than 200 authenticated occasions - humans learn a little
more about giant squids and a lot more about themselves.  In the past,
giant squids have aroused a murderous, fearful curiosity that is perhaps as
much a measure of the primal gap between vertebrates and invertebrates as
the one between man and squid.  So much difference is hard to accept.
        Looking at this supple beast - with so few hard parts, none giving support
to the body - a viewer could see that in life the density of the ocean
itself had given this squid all the support it needed, in every direction.
This creature is a boon for science, but its capture is also a reminder of
the desperate efficiency with which humans are now fishing even the deep
waters of earth.