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.